.^RVOFPr  ^ 


-^^^^ 


^LOGIC^,    ^^ 


(?DF/ 


£• 


THE     MODERN     LIBRARY 

OP      THE      WORLD'S      BEST      BOOKS 


THE 

VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS 

EXPERIENCE 


The  publishers  tvill  be  pleased  to  send,  upon  request,  an 
illustrated  folder  setting  forth  the  purpose  and  scope  of 
THE  MODERN  LihKAYiY,  and  listing  each  volume 
in  the  series.  Every  reader  of  books  will  find  titles  he  has 
been  looking  for,  handsomely  printed,  in  unabridged 
editions,  and  at  an  unusually  low  price. 


By  William  James 


THE     VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS     EXPERIENCE:     A     STUDY     IN     HUMAN     NATURE.     Gifford 

Lectures  delivered  at   Edinburgh   University.   Svo.   New   York,   London,   Bombay, 
and  Calcutta:   Longmans,   Green  &  Co. 
pragmatism:  a  new  name  for  some  old  ways  of  thinking:   popular  lectures 
ON   PHILOSOPHY.    8vo.   New   York,    London,    Bombay,    and    Calcutta:    Longmans, 
Green  &  Co. 

the  meaning  of  truth:  a  sequel  to  "PRAGILATISM."  8vo.  New  York,  London, 
Bombay,  and  Calcutta:  Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

A      PLURALISTIC      UNIVERSE:      HIBBERT      LECTURES      ON      THE      PRESENT      SITUATION      IN 

PHILOSOPHY.     8vo.     New    York,    London,     Bombay,     and    Calcutta:     Longmans. 
Green  &  Co. 

SOME  PROBLEMS  OF  PHILOSOPHY:  A  BEGINNING  OF  AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  PHI- 
LOSOPHY. 8vo.  New  York,  London,  Bombay,  and  Calcutta:  Longmans,  Green 
&  Co. 

ESSAYS  IN  RADICAL  EMPIRICISM.  8vo.  New  York,  Londou,  Bombay,  and  Calcutta: 
Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

THE    WILL    TO    BELIEVE,    AND    OTHER    ESSAYS    IN     POPULAR    PHILOSOPHY.     I2m0.    NcW 

York,  London,   Bombay,  and  Calcutta:   Longmans.   Green  &  Co. 

MEMORIES  AND  STUDIES.  8vo.  Ncw  York,  London,  Bombay,  and  Calcutta:  Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co. 

THE  PRINCIPLES  OF  PSYCHOLOGY.  2  vols.,  Svo.  New  Yoik :  Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
London :  Macmillan  &  Co. 

psychology:  briefer  course.  i2mo.  New  York:  Henry  Holt  &  Co.  London: 
Macmillan  &  Co. 

TALKS   TO   teachers   ON    PSYCHOLOGY:    AND   TO   STUDENTS    ON    SOME    OF    LIFE's    IDEALS. 

13 mo.   New   York:    Henry   Holt   &  Co.    London,    Bombay,   and   Calcutta:    Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co. 

HUMAN  IMMORTALITY:  TWO  SUPPOSED  OBJECTIONS  TO  THE  DOCTRINE.  l6m0.  Bos- 
ton: Houghton  Mifflin  Co.  London:  J.  M.  Dent  &  Sons,  Ltd. 

COLLECTED  ESSAYS  AND  REVIEWS.  Edited  by  R.  B.  Perry.  Svo.  New  York,  Lon- 
don, Bombay,  and  Calcutta:  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.   1920. 

HABIT.  Reprint  of  a  chapter  in  "The  Principles  of  Psychology."  i6mo.  New 
York:   Henry  Holt  &  Co. 

ON  VITAL  RESERVES.  Reprint  of  "The  Energies  of  Men"  and  the  "Gospel  of  Re- 
laxation."  i6mo.  New  York:   Henry  Holt  &  Co. 

ON  SOME  OF  life's  IDEALS.  Reprint  of  "On  a  Certain  Blindness  in  Human  Beings" 
and  "What  Makes  a  Life  Significant."   i6mo.  New  York:   Henry  Holt  &  Co. 

ANNOTATED    BIBLIOGRAPHY    OF    THE    WRITINGS    OF    WILLIAM    JAMES.    By    R.    B.    Perry. 

8vo.  New  York,  London,  Bombay,  and  Calcutta:  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  1920. 


THE  LITERARY  REMAINS   OF   HENRY  JAMES.   Edited,  With  an  Introduction,   by  Wil- 
liam  James.    With    Portrait.    Crown   Svo.    Boston:    Houghton    Mifflin    Co.    18S5. 


LETTERS  OF  WILLIAM  JAMES.  Selected  and  edited  with  Biographical  Introduction 
and  Notes  by  his  son  Henry  James.  2  vols.,  Svo.  Boston:  Atlantic  Monthly 
Press,  Inc.  London:   Longmans,  Green  &  Co.   1920. 


fHE    THOUGHT    AND    CHARACTER    OF    WILLIAM    JAMES.    By    R.    B.    Perry.    2    Vols.,    8v0. 

Boston:    Little,    Brown,    and   Co.    1935. 


THE  VARIETIES^  '''\1 

OF 
RELIGIOUS 

EXPERIENCE 

A  Study  in  Human  Nature 

BEING  THE   GIFFORD  LECTURES  ON 

NATURAL   RELIGION   DELIVERED   AT 

EDINBURGH  IN  190I-1902 

BY  ^VILLIAM  JAMES 


THE 

MODERN  LIBRARY 

NE>A^  YORK 


COPYRIGHT,    1902,    BY    WILLIAM    JAMES 


This  edition  of 

THE    VARIETIES    OF     RELIGIOUS     EXPERIBNCB 

is  authorized  by 
LONGMANS,    GREEN    AND    COMPANY 


d-of 


^    b 


__,.g>{a^jiiiiii.n|RiB 

^^5^___ 

Random  House  is  the 

PUBLIS  HER    OF 

THE     MODERN 

LIBRARY 

BENNETT    A.    CERF    •     DONALD    S.    KLOPFER    ■    ROBERT    K.   HAAS 

Manufactured  in  the  United  States  of  America 

Printed  by  Parkway  Printing  Company 

Bound  by  H.  WolfiF 

WILLIAM  JAMES 

(1842-1910) 

A  NOTE  ON  THE  AUTHOR  OF  "THE  VARIETIES 
OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE" 

The  road  by  which  William  James  arrived  at  his  position  of 
leadership  among  American  philosophers  was,  during  his  child- 
hood, youth  and  early  maturity,  quite  as  circuitous  and  unpre- 
dictable as  were  his  father's  ideas  on  the  training  of  his  children. 
That  Swedenborgian  theologian  foresaw  neither  the  career  of 
novelist  for  his  son  Henry,  nor  that  of  pragmatist  philosopher 
for  the  older  William.  The  father's  migrations  between  New 
York,  Europe  and  Newport  meant  that  William's  education  had 
variety  if  it  did  not  have  fixed  direction.  From  13  to  18  be 
studied  in  Europe  and  returned  to  Newport,  Rhode  Island,  to 
study  painting  under  the  guidance  of  John  La  Farge.  After  a 
year,  he  gave  up  art  for  science  and  entered  Harvard  University, 
where  his  most  influential  teachers  were  Louis  Agassiz  and 
Charles  W.  Eliot.  In  1863,  William  James  began  the  study  of 
medicine,  and  in  1865  he  joined  an  expedition  to  the  Amazon. 
Before  long,  he  wrote:  "If  there  is  anything  I  hate,  it  is  collect- 
ing." His  studies  constantly  interrupted  by  ill  health,  James  re- 
turned to  Germany  and  began  hearing  lectures  and  reading 
voluminously  in  philosophy.  He  won  his  medical  degree  at 
Harvard  in  1870.  For  four  years  he  was  an  invalid  in  Cam- 
bridge, but  finally,  in  1873,  he  passed  his  gravest  physical  and 
spiritual  crises  and  began  the  career  by  which  he  was  to  influ- 
ence so  profoundly  generations  of  American  students.  From 
1880  to  1907  he  was  successively  assistant  professor  of  phi- 
losophy, professor  of  psychology  and  professor  of  philosophy  at 
Harvard.  In  1890,  the  publication  of  his  Principles  of  Psychol- 
ogy brought  him  the  acknowledged  leadership  in  the  Field  of 
functional  psychology.  The  selection  of  William  James  to  de- 
liver the  Gifford  lectures  in  Edinburgh  was  at  once  a  tribute  to 
him  and  a  reward  for  the  university  that  sponsored  the  under- 
taking. These  lectures,  collected  in  this  volume,  have  since  be- 
come famous  as  the  standard  scientific  work  on  the  psychology 
of  the  religious  impulse.  Death  ended  his  career  on  August 
27th,  1910. 


To 
E.  P.  G. 

IN    FILIAL    GRATITUDE    AND    LOVF 


CONTENTS 

LECTURE   I 

PAGE 

RELIGION    AND    NEUROLOGY  .....         3 

Introduction:  the  course  is  not  anthropological,  but 
deals  with  personal  documents — Questions  of  fact  and 
questions  of  value — In  point  of  fact,  the  religious  are 
often  neurotic — Criticism  of  medical  materialism,  which 
condemns  religion  on  that  account — Theory  that  re- 
ligion has  a  sexual  origin  refuted — All  states  of  mind 
are  neurally  conditioned — Their  significance  must  be 
tested  not  by  their  origin  but  by  the  value  of  their  fruit* 
— Three  criteria  of  value;  origin  useless  as  a  criterion- 
Advantages  of  the  psychopathic  temperament  when  a 
superior  intellect  goes  with  it — especially  for  the  religious 
life. 

LECTURE    II 

CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF    THE    TOPIC  ^7 

Futility  of  simple  definitions  of  religion — No  one  spe- 
cific "religious  sentiment" — Institutional  and  personal 
religion — We  confine  ourselves  to  the  personal  branch — 
Definition  of  religion  for  the  purpose  of  these  lectures 
— Meaning  of  the  term  "divine" — The  divine  is  what 
prompts  solemn  reactions — Impossible  to  make  our  defi- 
nitions sharp — We  must  study  the  more  extreme  cases 
— Two  ways  of  accepting  the  universe — Religion  is  more 
enthusiastic  than  philosophy — Its  characteristic  is  en- 
thusiasm in  solemn  emotion — Its  ability  to  overcome  un- 
happiness — Need  of  such  a  faculty  from  the  biological 

point  of  view. 

ix 


CONTENTS 


LECTURE    III 


PACE 


THE   REALITY    OF    THE   UNSEEN  53 

Percepts  versus  abstract  concepts — Influence  of  the 
latter  on  belief — Kant's  theological  Ideas — We  have  a 
sense  of  reality  other  than  that  given  by  the  special 
senses — Examples  of  "sense  of  presence" — The  feeling  of 
unreality — Sense  of  a  divine  presence:  examples — Mys- 
tical experiences:  examples — Other  cases  of  sense  of 
God's  presence — Convincingness  of  unreasoned  experi- 
ence— Inferiority  of  rationalism  in  establishing  belief — 
Either  enthusiasm  or  solemnity  may  preponderate  in  the 
religious  attitude  of  individuals. 

LECTURES   IV    AND    V 
THE    RELIGION    OF    HEALTH  Y-MINDEDNESS  .    77 

Happiness  is  man's  chief  concern — "Once-born"  and 
"twice-born"  characters — Walt  Whitman — Mixed  na- 
ture of  Greek  feeling — Systematic  healthy-mindedness — 
Its  reasonableness — Liberal  Christianity  shows  it — Op- 
timism as  encouraged  'by  Popular  Science — The  "Mind- 
cure"  movement — Its  creed — Cases — Its  doctrine  of  evil 
— Its  analogy  to  Lutheran  theology — Salvation  by  relaxa- 
tion— Its  methods:  suggestion — meditation — "recollec- 
tion"— verification — Diversity  of  possible  schemes  of 
adaptation  to  the  universe — Appendix:  Two  mind- 
cure  cases. 

LECTURES    VI    AND   VII 
THE   SICK    SOUL  .  .    I25 

Healthy-mindedness  and  repentance — Essential  plural- 
ism of  the  healthy-minded  philosophy — Morbid-minded- 
ncss:  its  two  degrees — The  pain-threshold  varies  in  indi- 
viduals— Insecurity  of  natural  goods — Failure,  or  vain 


CONTENTS  XI 

PAGI 

success  of  every  life — Pessimism  of  all  pure  naturalism 
— Hopelessness  of  Greek  and  Roman  view — Pathological 
unhappiness  —  "Anhedonia"  —  Querulous  melancholy 
— Vital  zest  is  a  pure  gift — Loss  of  it  makes  physical 
world  look  different — Tolstoy — Bunyan — Alline — Mor- 
bid fear — Such  cases  need  a  supernatural  religion  for 
relief — Antagonism  of  healthy-mindedness  and  morbid 
ness — The  problem  of  evil  cannot  be  escaped. 

LECTURE    VIII 

THE    DIVIDED    SELF,    AND    THE    PROCESS    OF    ITS    UNI- 
FICATION 163 

Heterogeneous  personality — Character  gradually  at- 
tains unity — Examples  of  divided  self — The  unity  at- 
tained need  not  be  religious — "Counter  conversion"  cases 
— Other  cases — Gradual  and  sudden  unification — Tol- 
stoy's recovery — Bunyan's. 


[86 


LECTURE    IX 

CONVERSION 

Case  of  Stephen  Bradley — The  psychology  of  charac- 
ter-changes— Emotional  excitements  make  new  centres 
of  personal  energy — Schematic  ways  of  representing  this 
— Starbuck  likens  conversion  to  normal  moral  ripening — 
Leuba's  ideas — Seemingly  unconvertible  persons — Two 
types  of  conversion — Subconscious  incubation  of  mo- 
tives— Self-surrender — Its  importance  in  religious  history 
— Cases. 

LECTURE  X  • 

CONVERSION — concluded  ...  213 

Cases  of  sudden  conversion — Is  suddenness  essential? 
— No,  it  depends  on  psychological  idiosyncrasy — Proved 


Xll  CONTENTS 

PAQB 

existence  of  transmarginal,  or  subliminal,  consciousness 
— "Automatisms" — Instantaneous  conversions  seem  due 
to  the  possession  of  an  active  subconscious  self  by  the 
subject — The  value  of  conversion  depends  not  on  the 
process,  but  on  the  fruits — These  are  not  superior  in 
sudden  conversion — Professor  Coe's  views — Sanctifica- 
tion  as  a  result — Our  psychological  account  does  not 
exclude  direct  presence  of  the  Deity — Sense  of  higher 
control — Relations  of  the  emotional  "faith-state"  to  in- 
tellectual beliefs — Leuba  quoted — Characteristics  of  the 
faith-state:  sense  of  truth;  the  world  appears  new — 
Sensory  and  motor  automatisms — Permanency  of  con- 
versions. 

LECTURES    XI,    XII,   AND    XIII 
iiAINTLINESS  .  254 

Sainte-Beuve  on  the  State  of  Grace — Types  of  charac- 
ter as  due  to  the  balance  of  impulses  and  inhibitions — 
Sovereign    excitements — Irascibility — Effects    of    higher 
excitement  in  general — The  saintly  life  is  ruled  by  spir- 
itual excitement — This  may  annul  sensual  impulses  per- 
manently— Probable   subconscious   influences   involved — 
Mechanical   scheme   for   representing   permanent   altera- 
tion in  character — Characteristics  of  saintliness — Sense  of 
reality   of   a   higher   power — Peace   of   mind,   charity —  . 
Equanimity,  fortitude,  etc. — Connection  of  this  with  re- 
laxation— Purity    of    life — Asceticism — Obedience — Pov-  1 
erty — The  sentiments  of  democracy  and  of  humanity —  ' 
General  effects  of  higher  excitements. 

LECTURES    XIV    AND   XV 
THE    VALUE    OF    SAINTLINESS  .    32O 

It  must  be  tested  by  the  human  value  of  its  fruits — 


CONTENTS  Xlll 

PAGE 

l-he  reality  of  the  God  must,  however,  also  be  judged — 
"Unfit"  rehgions  get  eliminated  by  "experience" — Em- 
piricism is  not  skepticism — Individual  and  tribal  religion 
— Loneliness  of  religious  originators — Corruption  fol- 
lows success — Extravagances — Excessive  devoutness,  as 
fanaticism — As  theopathic  absorption — Excessive  purity 
— Excessive  charity — The  perfect  man  is  adapted  only 
to  the  perfect  environment — Saints  are  leavens — Excesses 
of  asceticism — Asceticism  symbolically  stands  for  the 
heroic  life — Militarism  and  voluntary  poverty  as  possible 
equivalents — Pros  and  cons  of  the  saintly  character — 
Saints  versus  "strong"  men — Their  social  function  must 
be  considered — Abstractly  the  saint  is  the  highest  type, 
but  in  the  present  environment  it  may  fail,  so  we  make 
ourselves  saints  at  our  peril — The  question  of  theological 
truth. 


LECTURES    XVI    AND  XVII 
MYSTICISM 37> 

Mysticism  defined — Four  marks  of  mystic  states — 
They  form  a  distinct  region  of  consciousness — Examples 
of  their  lower  grades — Mysticism  and  alcohol — "The 
anaesthetic  revelation" — Religious  mysticism — Aspects  of 
Nature — Consciousness  of  God — "Cosmic  consciousness" 
— Yoga — Buddhistic  mysticism — Sufism — Christian  mys- 
tics— Their  sense  of  revelation — Tonic  effects  of  mystic 
states — They  describe  by  negatives — Sense  of  union  with 
the  Absolute — Mysticism  and  music — Three  conclusions 
— (i)  Mystical  states  carry  authority  for  him  who  has 
them — (2)  But  for  no  one  else — (3)  Nevertheless,  they 
break  down  the  exclusive  authority  of  rationalistic  states 
— They  strengthen  monistic  and  optimistic  hypotheses. 


PAOB 


421 


XIV  CONTENTS 

LECTURE    XVIII 

PHILOSOPHY 

Primacy  of  feeling  in  religion,  philosophy  being  a  sec- 
ondary function — Intellectualism  professes  to  escape 
subjective  standards  in  her  theological  constructions — 
"Dogmatic  theology" — Criticism  of  its  account  of  God's 
attributes — "Pragmatism"  as  a  test  of  the  value  of  con- 
ceptions— God's  metaphysical  attributes  have  no  practical 
significance — His  moral  attributes  are  proved  by  bad 
arguments;  collapse  of  systematic  theology — Does  tran- 
scendental idealism  fare  better?  Its  principles — Quota- 
tions from  John  Caird — They  are  good  as  restatements  of 
religious  experience,  but  uncoercive  as  reasoned  proof — 
What  philosophy  can  do  for  religion  by  transforming 
herself  into  "science  of  religions." 

LECTURE   XIX 
OTHER    CHARACTERISTICS  .  .    448 

yEsthetic  elements  in  religion — Contrast  of  Catholicism 
and  Protestantism — Sacrifice  and  Confession — Prayer — 
Religion  holds  that  spiritual  work  is  really  effected  in 
prayer — Three  degrees  of  opinion  as  to  what  is  effected 
—  First  degree — Second  degree — Third  degree — Au- 
tomatisms, their  frequency  among  religious  leaders — 
Jewish  cases — Mohammed — Joseph  Smith — Religion  and 
the  subconscious  region  in  general. 

LECTURE    XX 
CONCLUSIONS  ...    475 

Summary  of  religious  characteristics — Men's  religions 
need  not  be  identical — "The  science  of  religions"  can 
only  suggest,  not  proclaim,  a  religious  creed — Is  religion 


CONTENTS  XV 


VA&t 


a  "survival"  of  primitive  thought? — Modern  science  rules 
out  the  concept  of  personality — Anthropomorphism  and 
belief  in  the  personal  characterized  pre-scientific  thought 
— Personal  forces  are  real,  in  spite  of  this — Scientific 
objects  are  abstractions,  only  individualized  experiences 
are  concrete — Religion  holds  by  the  concrete — Pri- 
marily religion  is  a  biological  reaction — Its  simplest 
terms  are  an  uneasiness  and  a  deliverance;  description  of 
the  deliverance — Question  of  the  reality  of  the  higher 
power — The  author's  hypotheses:  i.  The  subconscious 
self  as  intermediating  betvv'een  nature  and  the  higher 
region — 2.  The  higher  region,  or  "God" — 3.  He  pro- 
duces real  effects  in  nature. 

POSTSCRIPT  5^^ 

Philosophic  position  of  the  present  work  defined  as 
piecemeal  supernaturalism — Criticism  of  universalistic 
supernaturalism — Different  principles  must  occasion  dif- 
ferences in  fact — What  differences  in  fact  can  God's 
existence  occasion? — The  question  of  immortality — 
Question  of  God's  uniqueness  and  infinity:  religious  ex- 
perience does  not  setde  this  question  in  the  affirmative 
— The  pluralistic  hypothesis  is  more  conformed  to  com- 
mon sense. 

INDEX 5^9 


PREFACE 

THIS  book  would  never  have  Wen  written  had  I  not 
been  honored  with  an  appointment  as  Giflford  Lec- 
turer on  Natural  Religion  at  the  University  of  Edinburgh. 
In  casting  about  me  for  subjects  of  the  two  courses  of 
ten  lectures  each  for  which  I  thus  became  responsible, 
it  seemed  to  me  that  the  first  course  might  well  be  a 
descriptive  one  on  "Man's  Religious  Appetites,"  and  the 
second  a  metaphyical  one  on  "Their  Satisfaction  through 
Philosophy,"  But  the  unexpected  growth  of  the  psycho- 
logical matter  as  I  came  to  write  it  out  has  resulted  in 
the  second  subject  being  postponed  entirely,  and  the  de- 
scription of  man's  religious  constitution  now  fills  the  twenty 
lectures.  In  Lecture  XX  I  have  suggested  rather  than 
stated  my  own  philosophic  conclusions,  and  the  reader  who 
desires  immediately  to  know  them  should  turn  to  pages 
501-509,  and  to  the  "Postscript"  of  the  book.  I  hope  to  be 
able  at  some  later  day  to  express  them  in  more  explicit 
form. 

In  my  belief  that  a  large  acquaintance  with  particulars 
often  makes  us  wiser  than  the  possession  of  abstract  for- 
mulas, however  deep,  I  have  loaded  the  lectures  with  con- 
crete examples,  and  I  have  chosen  these  among  the  extremer 
expressions  of  the  religious  temperament.  To  some  readers 
I  may  consequently  seem,  before  they  get  beyond  the 
middle  of  the  book,  to  offer  a  caricature  of  the  subject. 
Such  convulsions  of  piety,  they  will  say,  are  not  sane. 
If,  howevei^  they  will  have  the  patience  to  read  to  the 
end,  I   believe  that  this   unfavorable  impression   will   dis- 

xvii 


XVIU  PREFACE 

appear;  for  I  there  combine  the  rehgious  impulses  with 
other  principles  of  common  sense  which  serve  as  correctives 
of  exaggeration,  and  allow  the  individual  reader  to  draw 
as  moderate  conclusions  as  he  will. 

My  thanks  for  help  in  writing  these  lectures  are  due 
to  Edwin  D.  Starbuck,  of  Stanford  University,  who  made 
over  to  me  his  large  collection  of  manuscript  material; 
to  Henry  W.  Rankin,  of  East  Northfield,  a  friend  unseen 
but  proved,  to  whom  I  owe  precious  information;  to 
Theodore  Flournoy,  of  Geneva,  to  Canning  Schiller  of 
Oxford,  and  to  my  colleague  Benjamin  Rand,  for  docu- 
ments; to  my  colleague  Dickinson  S.  Miller,  and  to  my 
friends,  Thomas  Wren  Ward,  of  New  York,  and  Win- 
centy  Lutoslawski,  late  of  Cracow,  for  important  sugges- 
tions and  advice.  Finally,  to  conversations  with  the  la- 
mented Thomas  Davidson  and  to  the  use  of  his  books,  at 
Glenmore,  above  Keene  Valley,  I  owe  more  obligations 
than  I  can  well  express. 

Harvard  University, 
March,  1902. 


THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS 
EXPERIENCE 


Lecture  I 

RELIGION  AND  NEUROLOGY 

IT  is  with  no  small  amount  of  trepidation  that  I  take  m^ 
place  behind  this  desk,  and  face  this  learned  audience. 
To  us  Americans,  the  experience  of  receiving  instruction 
from  the  living  voice,  as  well  as  from  the  books,  of  Euro- 
pean scholars,  is  very  familiar.  At  my  own  University  of 
Harvard,  not  a  winter  passes  without  its  harvest,  large  or 
small,  of  lectures  from  Scottish,  English,  French,  or  German 
representatives  of  the  science  or  literature  of  their  respective 
countries  whom  we  have  either  induced  to  cross  the  ocean 
to  address  us,  or  captured  on  the  wing  as  they  were  visiting 
our  land.  It  seems  the  natural  thing  for  us  to  listen  whilst 
the  Europeans  talk.  The  contrary  habit,  of  talking  whilst 
the  Europeans  listen,  we  have  not  yet  acquired ;  and  in  him 
who  first  makes  the  adventure  it  begets  a  certain  sense  of 
apology  being  due  for  so  presumptuous  an  act.  Particularlji 
must  this  be  the  case  on  a  soil  as  sacred  to  the  American 
imagination  as  that  of  Edinburgh.  The  glories  of  the  philo- 
sophic chair  of  this  university  were  deeply  impressed  on  my 
imagination  in  boyhood.  Professor  Eraser's  Essays  in  Philos- 
ophy, then  just  published,  was  the  first  philosophic  book  I 
ever  looked  into,  and  I  well  remember  the  awestruck  feeling 
I  received  from  the  account  of  Sir  William  Hamilton's  class- 
room therein  contained.  Hamilton's  own  lectures  were  the 
first  philosophic  writings  I  ever  forced  myself  to  study,  and 
after  that  I  was  immersed  in  Dugald  Stewart  and  Thomas 
Brown.  Such  juvenile  emotions  of  reverence  never  get  out- 
grown ;  and  I  confess  that  to  find  my  humble  self  promoted 


4  THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

from  my  native  wilderness  to  be  actually  for  the  time  an  of- 
ficial here,  and  transmuted  into  a  colleague  of  these  illustri- 
ous names,  carries  with  it  a  sense  of  dreamland  quite  as 
much  as  of  reality. 

But  since  I  have  received  the  honor  of  this  appointment  I 
have  felt  that  it  would  never  do  to  decline.  The  academic 
career  also  has  its  heroic  obligations,  so  I  stand  here  without 
further  deprecatory  words.  Let  me  say  only  this,  that  now 
that  the  current,  here  and  at  Aberdeen,  has  begun  to  run 
from  west  to  east,  I  hope  it  may  continue  to  do  so.  As  the 
years  go  by,  I  hope  that  many  of  my  countrymen  may  be 
asked  to  lecture  in  the  Scottish  universities,  changing  places 
with  Scotsmen  lecturing  in  the  United  States;  I  hope  that 
our  people  may  become  in  all  these  higher  matters  even  as 
one  people;  and  that  the  peculiar  philosophic  temperament, 
as  well  as  the  peculiar  political  temperament,  that  goes  with 
our  English  speech  may  more  and  more  pervade  and  in- 
fluence the  world. 

As  regards  the  manner  in  which  I  shall  have  to  adminis- 
ter this  lectureship,  I  am  neither  a  theologian,  nor  a  scholar 
learned  in  the  history  of  religions,  nor  an  anthropologist. 
Psychology  is  the  only  branch  of  learning  in  which  I  am 
particularly  versed.  To  the  psychologist  the  religious  pro- 
pensities of  man  must  be  at  least  as  interesting  as  any  other 
of  the  facts  pertaining  to  his  mental  constitution.  It  would 
seem,  therefore,  that,  as  a  psychologist,  the  natural  tbing 
for  me  would  be  to  invite  you  to  a  descriptive  survey  of 
those  religious  propensities. 

If  the  inquiry  be  psychological,  not  religious  institutions, 
but  rather  religious  feelings  and  religious  impulses  must  be 
its  subject,  and  I  must  confine  myself  to  those  more  de- 
veloped subjective  phenomena  recorded  in  literature  pro- 
duced by  articulate  and  fully  self-conscious  men,  in  works 
of  piety  and  autobiography.  Interesting  as  the  origins  and 


RELIGION    AND   NEUROLOGY  5 

early  stages  of  a  subject  always  are,  yet  when  one  seeks 
earnestly  for  its  full  significance,  one  must  always  look  to 
its  more  completely  evolved  and  perfect  forms.  It  follows 
from  this  that  the  documents  that  will  most  concern  us  will 
be  those  of  the  men  who  were  most  accomplished  in  the  re- 
ligious life  and  best  able  to  give  an  intelligible  account  of 
their  ideas  and  motives.  These  men,  of  course,  are  either 
comparatively  modern  writers,  or  else  such  earlier  ones  as 
have  become  religious  classics.  The  documents  humains 
which  we  shall  find  most  instructive  need  not  then  be  sought 
for  in  the  haunts  of  special  erudition — they  lie  along  the 
beaten  highway;  and  this  circumstance,  which  flows  so 
naturally  from  the  character  of  our  problem,  suits  admir- 
ably also  your  lecturer's  lack  of  special  theological  learning. 
I  may  take  my  citations,  my  sentences  and  paragraphs  of 
personal  confession,  from  books  that  most  of  you  at  some 
time  will  have  had  already  in  your  hands,  and  yet  this  will 
be  no  detriment  to  the  value  of  my  conclusions.  It  is  true 
that  some  more  adventurous  reader  and  investigator,  lectur- 
ing here  in  future,  may  unearth  from  the  shelves  of  libraries 
documents  that  will  make  a  more  delectable  and  curious  en- 
tertainment  to  listen  to  than  mine.  Yet  I  doubt  whether  he, 
will  necessarily,  by  his  control  of  so  much  more  out-of-the- 
way  material,  get  much  closer  to  the  essence  of  the  matter 
in  hand. 

The  question.  What  are  the  religious  propensities.''  and 
the  question.  What  is  their  philosophic  significance?  are  two 
entirely  different  orders  of  question  from  the  logical  point 
of  view;  and,  as  a  failure  to  recognize  this  fact  distinctly 
may  breed  confusion,  I  wish  to  insist  upon  the  point  a  little 
before  we  enter  into  the  documents  and  materials  to  which 
I  have  referred. 

In  recent  books  on  logic,  distinction  is  made  between  two 
orders  of  inquiry  concerning  anything.  First,  what  is  the 
nature  of  it.?  how  did  it  come  about.-'  what  is  its  constitu 


6         THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tion,  origin,  and  history?  And  second,  What  is  its  impor- 
tance, meaning,  or  significance,  now  that  it  is  once  here? 
The  answer  to  the  one  question  is  given  in  an  existential 
judgment  or  proposition.  The  answer  to  the  other  is  a 
proposition  of  value,  what  the  Germans  call  a  Werthur- 
theil,  or  what  we  may,  if  we  like,  denominate  a  spiritual 
judgment.  Neither  judgment  can  be  deduced  immediately 
from  the  other.  They  proceed  from  diverse  intellectual  pre- 
occupations, and  the  mind  combines  them  only  by  making 
them  first  separately,  and  then  adding  them  together. 

In  the  matter  of  religions  it  is  particularly  easy  to  distin- 
guish the  two  orders  of  question.  Every  religious  phenomenon 
has  its  history  and  its  derivation  from  natural  antecedents. 
What  is  nowadays  called  the  higher  criticism  of  the  Bible 
is  only  a  study  of  the  Bible  from  this  existential  point  of 
view,  neglected  too  much  by  the  earlier  church.  Under  just 
what  biographic  conditions  did  the  sacred  writers  bring 
forth  their  various  contributions  to  the  holy  volume?  And 
what  had  they  exactly  in  their  several  individual  minds, 
when  they  delivered  their  utterances?  These  are  manifestly 
questions  of  historical  fact,  and  one  does  not  see  how  the 
answer  to  them  can  decide  oflhand  the  still  further  question : 
of  what  use  should  such  a  volume,  with  its  manner  of  com- 
ing into  existence  so  defined,  be  to  us  as  a  guide  to  life  and 
a  revelation?  To  answer  this  other  question  we  must  have 
already  in  our  mind  some  sort  of  a  general  theory  as  to 
what  the  peculiarities  in  a  thing  should  be  which  give  it 
value  for  purposes  of  revelation ;  and  this  theory  itself  would 
be  what  I  just  called  a  spiritual  judgment.  Combining  it 
with  our  existential  judgment,  we  might  indeed  deduce  an- 
other spiritual  judgment  as  to  the  Bible's  worth.  Thus  if  our 
theory  of  revelation-value  were  to  affirm  that  any  book,  to 
possess  it,  must  have  been  composed  automatically  or  not  by 
the  free  caprice  of  the  writer,  or  that  it  must  exhibit  no 
scientific  and  historic  errors  and  express  no  local  or  personal 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  7 

passions,  the  Bible  would  probably  fare  ill  at  our  hands.  But 
if,  on  the  other  hand,  our  theory  should  allow  that  a  book 
may  well  be  a  revelation  in  spite  of  errors  and  passions  and 
deliberate  human  composition,  if  only  it  be  a  true  record  of 
the  inner  experiences  of  great-souled  persons  wrestling  with 
the  crises  of  their  fate,  then  the  verdict  would  be  much  more 
favorable.  You  see  that  the  existential  facts  by  themselves 
are  insufficient  for  determining  the  value;  and  the  best 
adepts  of  the  higher  criticism  accordingly  never  confound 
the  existential  with  the  spiritual  problem.  With  the  same 
conclusions  of  fact  before  them,  some  take  one  view,  and 
some  another,  of  the  Bible's  value  as  a  revelation,  according 
as  their  spiritual  judgment  as  to  the  foundation  of  values 
differs. 

I  make  these  general  remarks  about  the  two  sorts  of  judg- 
ment, because  there  are  many  religious  persons — some  of  you 
now  present,  possibly,  are  among  them — who  do  not  yet 
make  a  working  use  of  the  distinction,  and  who  may  there- 
fore feel  first  a  little  startled  at  the  purely  existential  point 
of  view  from  which  in  the  following  lectures  the  phenomena 
of  religious  experience  must  be  considered.  When  I  handle 
them  biologically  and  psychologically  as  if  they  were  mere 
curious  facts  of  individual  history,  some  of  you  may  think 
it  a  degradation  of  so  sublime  a  subject,  and  may  even  sus- 
pect me,  until  my  purpose  gets  more  fully  expressed,  of  de- 
liberately seeking  to  discredit  the  religious  side  of  life. 

Such  a  result  is  of  course  absolutely  alien  to  my  intention; 
and  since  such  a  prejudice  on  your  part  would  seriously  ob- 
struct the  due  effect  of  much  of  what  I  have  to  relate,  I  will 
devote  a  few  more  words  to  the  point. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  as  a  matter  of  fact  a  religious 
life,  exclusively  pursued,  does  tend  to  make  the  person  ex- 
ceptional and  eccentric.  I  speak  not  now  of  your  ordinary 
religious  believer,  who  follows  the  conventional  observances 


!5         THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

of  his  country,  whether  it  be  Buddhist,  Christian,  or  Mo- 
hammedan. His  rehgion  has  been  made  for  him  by  others, 
communicated  to  him  by  tradition,  determined  to  fixed 
forms  by  imitation,  and  retained  by  habit.  It  would  profit 
us  Httle  to  study  this  second-hand  reUgious  hfe.  We  must 
make  search  rather  for  the  original  experiences  which  were 
•he  pattern-setters  to  all  this  mass  of  suggested  feeling  and 
imitated  conduct.  These  experiences  we  can  only  find  in  in- 
dividuals for  whom  religion  exists  not  as  a  dull  habit,  but 
;.s  an  acute  fever  rather.  But  such  individuals  are  "geniuses" 
in  the  religious  line;  and  like  many  other  geniuses  who  have 
brought  forth  fruits  effective  enough  for  commemoration  in 
die  pages  of  biography,  such  religious  geniuses  have  often 
biiown  symptoms  of  nervous  instability.  Even  more  perhaps 
than  other  kinds  of  genius,  religious  leaders  have  been  sub- 
ject to  abnormal  psychical  visitations.  Invariably  they  have 
been  creatures  of  exalted  emotional  sensibility.  Often  they 
have  led  a  discordant  inner  life,  and  had  melancholy  during 
a  part  of  their  career.  They  have  known  no  measure,  been 
liable  to  obsessions  and  fixed  ideas;  and  frequently  they 
have  fallen  into  trances,  heard  voices,  seen  visions,  and  pre- 
sented all  sorts  of  peculiarities  which  are  ordinarily  classed 
as  pathological.  Often,  moreover,  these  pathological  features 
in  their  career  have  helped  to  give  them  their  religious  au- 
thority and  influence. 

If  you  ask  for  a  concrete  example,  there  can  be  no  better 
one  than  is  furnished  by  the  person  of  George  Fox.  The 
Quaker  religion  which  he  founded  is  something  which  it  is 
impossible  to  overpraise.  In  a  day  of  shams,  it  was  a  religion 
of  veracity  rooted  in  spiritual  inwardness,  and  a  return  to 
something  more  like  the  original  gospel  truth  than  men  had 
ever  known  in  England.  So  far  as  our  Christian  sects  today 
are  evolving  into  liberality,  they  are  simply  reverting  in  es- 
sence to  the  position  which  Fox  and  the  early  Quakers  so 
long  ago  assumed.  No  one  can  pretend  for  a  moment  that 


RELIGION    AND   NEUROLOGY  9 

in  point  of  spiritual  sagacity  and  capacity,  Fox's  mind  was 
unsound.  Everyone  who  confronted  him  personally,  from 
Oliver  Cromwell  down  to  county  magistrates  and  jailers, 
seems  to  have  acknowledged  his  superior  power.  Yet  from 
the  point  of  view  of  his  nervous  constitution,  Fox  was  a 
psychopath  or  detraque  of  the  deepest  dye.  His  Journal 
abounds  in  entries  of  this  sort: — 

"As  I  was  walking  with  several  friends,  I  lifted  up  my  head, 
and  saw  three  steeple-house  spires,  and  they  struck  at  my  life.  I 
asked  them  what  place  that  was?  They  said,  Lichfield.  Immedi- 
ately the  word  of  the  Lord  came  to  me,  that  I  must  go  thither. 
Being  come  to  the  house  we  were  going  to,  I  wished  the  friends 
to  walk  into  the  house,  saying  nothing  to  them  of  whither  I  was 
to  go.  As  soon  as  they  were  gone  I  stept  away,  and  went  by  my 
eye  over  hedge  and  ditch  till  I  came  within  a  mile  of  Lichfield; 
where,  in  a  great  field,  shepherds  were  keeping  their  sheep. 
Then  was  I  commanded  by  the  Lord  to  pull  off  my  shoes.  I 
stood  still,  for  it  was  winter:  but  the  word  of  the  Lord  was  like 
a  fire  in  me.  So  I  put  off  my  shoes  and  left  them  with  the  shep- 
herds; and  the  poor  shepherds  trembled,  and  were  astonished, 
Then  I  walked  on  about  a  mile,  and  as  soon  as  I  was  got  within 
the  city,  the  word  of  the  Lord  came  to  me  again,  saying:  Cry, 
'Wo  to  the  bloody  city  of  Lichfield!'  So  I  went  up  and  down  the 
streets,  crying  with  a  loud  voice.  Wo  to  the  bloody  city  of 
Lichfield!  It  being  market  day,  I  went  into  the  market-place, 
and  to  and  fro  in  the  several  parts  of  it,  and  made  stands,  cry- 
ing as  before.  Wo  to  the  bloody  city  of  Lichfield!  And  no  one 
laid  hands  on  me.  As  I  went  thus  crying  through  the  streets, 
there  seemed  to  me  to  be  a  channel  of  blood  running  down  the 
streets,  and  the  market-place  appeared  like  a  pool  of  blood. 
When  I  had  declared  what  was  upon  me,  and  felt  myself  clear, 
I  went  out  of  the  town  in  peace;  and  returning  to  the  shepherds 
gave  them  some  money,  and  took  my  shoes  of  them  again.  But 
the  fire  of  the  Lord  was  so  on  my  feet,  and  all  over  me,  that  I 
did  not  matter  to  put  on  my  shoes  again,  and  was  at  a  stand 
whether  I  should  or  no,  till  I  felt  freedom  from  the  Lord  so  to 
do:  then,  after  I  had  washed  my  feet,  I  put  on  my  shoes  again, 


10       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

After  this  a  deep  consideration  came  upon  me,  for  what  reason 
I  should  be  sent  to  cry  against  that  city,  and  call  it  The  bloody 
city!  For  though  the  parliament  had  the  minister  one  while,  and 
the  king  another,  and  much  blood  had  been  shed  in  the  town 
during  the  wars  between  them,  yet  there  was  no  more  than  had 
befallen  many  other  places.  But  afterwards  I  came  to  under- 
stand, that  in  the  Emperor  Diocletian's  time  a  thousand  Chris- 
tians were  martyr'd  in  Lichfield.  So  I  was  to  go,  without  my 
shoes,  through  the  channel  of  their  blood,  and  into  the  pool  of 
their  blood  in  the  market-place,  that  I  might  raise  up  the 
memorial  of  the  blood  of  those  martyrs,  which  had  been  shed 
above  a  thousand  years  before,  and  lay  cold  in  their  streets.  So 
the  sense  of  this  blood  was  upon  me,  and  I  obeyed  the  word  of 
the  Lord." 

Bent  as -we  are  on  studying  religion's  existential  condi- 
tions, we  cannot  possibly  ignore  these  pathological  aspects  of 
the  subject.  We  must  describe  and  name  them  just  as  if  they 
occurred  in  non-religious  men.  It  is  true  that  we  instinc- 
tively recoil  from  seeing  an  object  to  which  our  emotions 
and  affections  are  committed  handled  by  the  intellect  as  any 
other  object  is  handled.  The  first  thing  the  intellect  does 
with  an  object  is  to  class  it  along  with  something  else.  But 
any  object  that  is  infinitely  important  to  us  and  awakens  our 
devotion  feels  to  us  also  as  if  it  must  be  sui  generis  and 
unique.  Probably  a  crab  would  be  filled  with  a  sense  of 
personal  outrage  if  it  could  hear  us  class  it  without  ado  or 
apology  as  a  crustacean,  and  thus  dispose  of  it.  "I  am  no 
such  thing,"  it  would  say;  I  am  myself,  myself  alone." 

The  next  thing  the  intellect  does  is  to  lay  bare  the  causes 
in  which  the  thing  originates.  Spinoza  says:  "I  will  analyze 
the  actions  and  appetites  of  men  as  if  it  were  a  question  of 
lines,  of  planes,  and  of  solids."  And  elsewhere  he  remarks 
that  he  will  consider  our  passions  and  their  properties  with 
the  same  eye  with  which  he  looks  on  all  other  natural  things, 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  II 

since  the  consequences  of  our  affections  flow  from  their 
nature  with  the  same  necessity  as  it  results  from  the  nature 
of  a  triangle  that  its  three  angles  should  be  equal  to  two 
right  angles.  Similarly  M.  Taine,  in  the  introduction  to  his 
history  of  English  literature,  has  written :  "Whether  facts  be 
moral  or  physical,  it  makes  no  matter.  They  always  have 
their  causes.  There  are  causes  for  ambition,  courage,  verac- 
ity, just  as  there  are  for  digestion,  muscular  movement,  ani- 
mal heat.  Vice  and  virtue  are  products  like  vitriol  and  sug- 
ar." When  we  read  such  proclamations  of  the  intellect  bent 
on  showing  the  existential  conditions  of  absolutely  every- 
thing, we  feel — quite  apart  from  our  legitimate  impatience 
at  the  somewhat  ridiculous  swagger  of  the  program,  in  view 
of  what  the  authors  are  actually  able  to  perform — menaced 
and  negated  in  the  springs  of  our  innermost  life.  Such  cold- 
blooded assimilations  threaten,  we  think,  to  undo  our  soul's 
vital  secrets,  as  if  the  same  breath  which  should  succeed  in 
explaining  their  origin  would  simultaneously  explain  away 
their  significance,  and  make  them  appear  of  no  more  pre- 
ciousness,  either,  than  the  useful  groceries  of  which  M. 
Taine  speaks. 

Perhaps  the  commonest  expression  of  this  assumption  that 
spiritual  value  is  undone  if  lowly  origin  be  asserted  is  seen 
in  those  comments  which  unsentimental  people  so  often  pass 
on  their  more  sentimental  acquaintances.  Alfred  believes  in 
immortality  so  strongly  because  his  temperament  is  so  emo- 
tional. Fanny's  extraordinary  conscientiousness  is  merely  a 
matter  of  overinstigated  nerves.  William's  melancholy  about 
the  universe  is  due  to  bad  digestion — probably  his  liver 
is  torpid.  Eliza's  delight  in  her  church  is  a  symptom  of  her 
hysterical  constitution.  Peter  would  be  less  troubled  about 
his  soul  if  he  would  take  more  exercise  in  the  open  air,  etc. 
A  more  fully  developed  example  of  the  same  kind  of  rea- 
soning is  the  fashion,  quite  common  nowadays  among  cer- 
tain writers,  of  criticizing  the  religious  emotions  by  show- 


12       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ing  a  connection  between  them  and  the  sexual  Hfe.  Conver- 
sion is  a  crisis  of  puberty  and  adolescence.  The  macerations 
of  saints,  and  the  devotion  of  missionaries,  are  only  in- 
stances of  the  parental  instinct  of  self-sacrifice  gone  astray. 
For  the  hysterical  nun,  starving  for  natural  life,  Christ  is  but 
an  imaginary  substitute  for  a  more  earthly  object  of  affec- 
tion.  And  the  like.^ 

^  As  with  many  ideas  that  float  in  the  air  of  one's  time,  this 
notion  shrinks  from  dogmatic  general  statement  and  expresses  it- 
self only  partially  and  by  innuendo.  It  seems  to  me  that  few  con- 
ceptions are  less  instructive  than  this  re-interpretation  of  religion 
as  perverted  sexuality.  It  reminds  one,  so  crudely  is  it  often  em- 
ployed, of  the  famous  Catholic  taunt,  that  the  Reformadon  may  be 
best  understood  by  remembering  that  its  jons  et  origo  was  Luther's 
wish  to  marry  a  nun: — the  effects  are  infinitely  wider  than  the  al- 
leged causes,  and  for  the  most  part  opposite  in  nature.  It  is  true 
diat  in  the  vast  collection  of  religious  phenomena,  some  are  un- 
disguisedly  amatory — e.  g.,  sex-deides  and  obscene  rites  in  poly- 
theism, and  ecstadc  feelings  of  union  with  the  Savior  in  a  few 
Christian  mysdcs.  But  then  why  not  equally  call  religion  an  aber- 
ration of  the  digestive  function,  and  prove  one's  point  by  the  wor- 
ohip  of  Bacchus  and  Ceres,  or  by  the  ecstatic  feelings  of  some  other 
saints  about  the  Eucharist?  Religious  language  clothes  itself  in  such 
poor  symbols  as  our  life  affords,  and  the  whole  organism  gives 
overtones  of  comment  whenever  the  mind  is  strongly  stirred  to 
expression.  Language  drawn  from  eating  and  drinking  is  probably 
as  common  in  religious  literature  as  is  language  drawn  from  the 
sexual  life.  We  "hunger  and  thirst"  after  righteousness;  we  "find 
the  Lord  a  sweet  savor;"  we  "taste  and  see  that  he  is  good."  "Spir- 
itual milk  for  American  babes,  drawn  from  the  breasts  of  both 
testaments,"  is  a  sub-tide  of  the  once  famous  New  England  Primer, 
and  Christian  devotional  literature  indeed  quite  floats  in  milk, 
thought  of  from  the  point  of  view,  not  of  the  mother,  but  of  the 
greedy  babe. 

Saint  Francois  de  Sales,  for  instance,  thus  describes  the  "orison 
of  quietude":  "In  this  state  the  soul  is  like  a  litde  child  still  at  the 
breast,  whose  mother,  to  caress  him  whilst  he  is  still  in  her  arms, 
makes  her  milk  distill  into  his  mouth  without  his  even  moving  his 
lips.  So  it  is  here.  .  .  .  Our  Lord  desires  that  our  will  should  be 
satisfied  with  sucking  the  milk  which  His  Majesty  pours  into  our 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  I3 

We  are  surely  all  familiar  in  a  general  way  with  this 
method  of  discrediting  states  of  mind  for  which  we  have  an 

mouth,  and  that  we  should  rehsh  the  sweetness  without  even  know- 
ing that  it  Cometh  from  the  Lord."  And  again:  "Consider  the  httle 
infants,  united  and  joined  to  the  breasts  of  their  nursing  mothers, 
you  will  see  that  from  time  to  dme  they  press  themselves  closer  by 
litde  starts  to  which  the  pleasure  of  sucking  prompts  them.  Even 
so,  during  its  orison,  the  heart  united  to  its  God  oftentimes  makes 
attempts  at  closer  union  by  movements  during  which  it  presses 
closer  upon  the  divine  sweetness."  Chemin  de  la  Perfection,  ch, 
xxxi.;  Amour  de  Dieu,  vii.  ch.  i. 

In  fact,  one  might  almost  as  well  interpret  religion  as  a  perver- 
sion of  the  respiratory  funcdon.  The  Bible  is  full  of  the  language 
of  respiratory  oppression:  "Hide  not  thine  ear  at  my  breathing;  my 
groaning  is  not  hid  from  thee;  my  heart  panteth,  my  strength 
faileth  me;  my  bones  are  hot  with  my  roaring  all  the  night  long; 
as  the  hart  panteth  after  the  water-brooks,  so  my  soul  panteth  after 
thee,  O  my  God."  God's  Breath  in  Man  is  the  dtle  of  the  chief  work 
of  our  best  known  American  mysdc  (Thomas  Lake  Harris) ;  and 
in  certain  non-Chrisdan  countries  the  foundadon  of  all  religious 
discipHne  consists  in  regulation  of  the  inspiration  and  expiration. 

These  arguments  are  as  good  as  much  of  the  reasoning  one  hears 
in  favor  of  the  sexual  theory.  But  the  champions  of  the  latter  will 
then  say  that  their  chief  argument  has  no  analogue  elsewhere.  The 
two  main  phenomena  of  rehgion,  namely,  melancholy  and  conver- 
sion, they  will  say,  are  essentially  phenomena  of  adolescence,  and 
therefore  synchronous  with  the  development  of  sexual  life.  To 
which  the  retort  again  is  easy.  Even  were  the  asserted  synchrony 
unrestrictedly  true  as  a  fact  (which  it  is  not),  it  is  not  only  the 
sexual  life,  but  the  entire  higher  mental  life  which  awakens  during 
adolescence.  One  might  then  as  well  set  up  the  thesis  diat  the  inter- 
est in  mechanics,  physics,  chemistry,  logic,  philosophy,  and  soci- 
ology, which  springs  up  during  adolescent  years  along  with  that  in 
poetry  and  religion,  is  also  a  perversion  of  the  sexual  instinct: — but 
that  would  be  too  absurd.  Moreover,  if  the  argument  from  syn- 
chrony is  to  decide,  what  is  to  be  done  with  the  fact  that  the  re- 
ligious age  par  excellence  would  seem  to  be  old  age,  when  the 
uproar  of  the  sexual  life  is  past? 

The  plain  truth  is  that  to  interpret  religion  one  must  in  the  end 
look  at  the  immediate  content  of  the  religious  consciousness.  The 
moment  one  does  this,  one  sees  how  wholly  disconnected  it  is  ir 


14       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

antipathy.  We  all  use  it  to  some  degree  in  criticizing  persons 
whose  states  of  mind  we  regard  as  overstrained.  But  when 
other  people  criticize  our  own  more  exalted  soul-flights  by 
calling  them  'nothing  but'  expressions  of  our  organic  dis- 
position, we  feel  outraged  and  hurt,  for  we  know  that, 
whatever  be  our  organism's  peculiarities,  our  mental  states 
have  their  substantive  value  as  revelations  of  the  living 
truth;  and  we  wish  that  all  this  medical  materialism  could 
be  made  to  hold  its  tongue. 

Medical  materialism  seems  indeed  a  good  appellation  for 
the  too  simple-minded  system  of  thought  which  we  are 
considering.  Medical  materialism  finishes  up  Saint  Paul  by 
calling  his  vision  on  the  road  to  Damascus  a  discharging 
lesion  of  the  occipital  cortex,  he  being  an  epileptic.  It  snufls 
out  Saint  Teresa  as  an  hysteric,  Saint  Francis  of  Assisi  as 
an  hereditary  degenerate.  George  Fox's  discontent  with  the 
shams  of  his  age,  and  his  pining  for  spiritual  veracity,  it 
treats  as  a  symptom  of  a  disordered  colon.  Carlyle's  organ- 
tones  of  misery  it  accounts  for  by  a  gastro-duodenal  ca- 
tarrh. All  such  mental  overtensions,  it  says,  are,  when  you 
come  to  the  bottom  of  the  matter,  mere  affairs  of  diathesis 
(auto-intoxications  most  probably),  due  to  the  perverted  ac- 

the  main  from  the  content  of  the  sexual  consciousness.  Everything 
about  the  two  things  differs,  objects,  moods,  faculties  concerned, 
and  acts  impelled  to.  Any  general  assimilation  is  simply  impossible: 
what  we  find  most  often  is  complete  hostility  and  contrast.  If  now 
the  defenders  of  the  sex-theory  say  that  this  makes  no  difference  to 
their  thesis;  that  without  the  chemical  contributions  which  the  sex- 
organs  make  to  the  blood,  the  brain  would  not  be  nourished  so  as 
to  carry  on  religious  acdvities,  this  final  proposidon  may  be  true  or 
not  true;  but  at  any  rate  it  has  become  profoundly  uninstrucdve: 
we  can  deduce  no  consequences  from  it  which  help  us  to  interpret 
religion's  meaning  or  value.  In  this  sense  the  religious  life  depends 
just  as  much  upon  the  spleen,  the  pancreas,  and  the  kidneys  as  on 
the  sexual  apparatus,  and  the  whole  theory  has  lost  its  point  in 
evaporadng  into  a  vague  general  asserdon  of  the  dependence,  some- 
how, of  the  mind  upon  the  body. 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  I5 

tion  of  various  glands  which  physiology  will  yet  discover. 

And  medical  materialism  then  thinks  that  the  spiritual 
authority  of  all  such  personages  is  successfully  undermined.' 

Let  us  ourselves  look  at  the  matter  in  the  largest  possible 
way.  Modern  psychology,  finding  definite  psycho-physical 
connections  to  hold  good,  assumes  as  a  convenient  hypoth- 
esis that  the  dependence  of  mental  states  upon  bodily  con- 
ditions must  be  thoroughgoing  and  complete.  If  we  adopt 
the  assumption,  then  of  course  what  medical  materialism 
insists  on  must  be  true  in  a  general  way,  if  not  in  every 
detail:  Saint  Paul  certainly  had  once  an  epileptoid,  if  not  an 
epileptic  seizure;  George  Fox  was  an  hereditary  degener- 
ate; Carlyle  was  undoubtedly  auto-intoxicated  by  some 
organ  or  other,  no  matter  w^hich — and  the  rest.  But  now,  I 
ask  you,  how  can  such  an  existential  account  of  facts  of 
mental  history  decide  in  one  way  or  another  upon  their 
spiritual  significance?  According  to  the  general  postulate 
of  psychology  just  referred  to,  there  is  not  a  single  one  of 
our  states  of  mind,  high  or  low,  healthy  or  morbid,  that  has 
not  some  organic  process  as  its  condition.  Scientific  theories 
are  organically  conditioned  just  as  much  as  religious  emo- 
tions are;  and  if  we  only  knew  the  facts  intimately  enough, 
we  should  doubtless  see  "the  liver"  determining  the  dicta 
of  the  sturdy  atheist  as  decisively  as  it  does  those  of  the 
Methodist  under  conviction  anxious  about  his  soul.  When 
it  alters  in  one  way  the  blood  that  percolates  it,  we  get  the 
methodist,  when  in  another  way,  we  get  the  atheist  form  of 
mind.  So  of  all  our  raptures  and  our  drynesses,  our  longings 
and  pantings,  our  questions  and  beliefs.  They  are  equally 
organically  founded,  be  they  religious  or  of  non-religious 
content. 

To  plead  the  organic  causation  of  a  religious  state  of 

^  For  a  first-rate  example  of  medical-materialist  reasoning,  see  an 
article  on  "les  Varietes  du  Type  devot,"  by  Dr.  Binet-Sangle,  in  the 
Revue  de  I'Hypnotisme,  xiv.  161. 


l6       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

mind,  then,  in  refutation  of  its  claim  to  possess  superior 
spiritual  value,  is  quite  illogical  and  arbitrary,  unless  one 
has  already  worked  out  in  advance  some  psycho-physical 
theory  connecting  spiritual  values  in  general  with  deter- 
minate sorts  of  physiological  change.  Otherwise  none  of 
our  thoughts  and  feelings,  not  even  our  scientific  doctrines, 
not  even  our  ^/V-beliefs,  could  retain  any  value  as  revela- 
tions of  the  truth,  for  every  one  of  them  without  exception 
flows  from  the  state  of  its  possessor's  body  at  the  time. 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  medical  materialism  draws  in 
point  of  fact  no  such  sweeping  skeptical  conclusion.  It  is 
sure,  just  as  every  simple  man  is  sure,  that  some  states  of 
mind  are  inwardly  superior  to  others,  and  reveal  to  us 
more  truth,  and  in  this  it  simply  makes  use  of  an  ordinary 
spiritual  judgment.  It  has  no  physiological  theory  of  the 
production  of  these  its  favorite  states,  by  which  it  may  ac- 
credit them;  and  its  attempt  to  discredit  the  states  which  it 
dislikes,  by  vaguely  associating  them  with  nerves  and  liver, 
and  connecting  them  with  names  connoting  bodily  afflic- 
tion, is  altogether  illogical  and  inconsistent. 

Let  us  play  fair  in  this  whole  matter,  and  be  quite  can- 
did with  ourselves  and  with  the  facts.  When  we  think  cer- 
tain states  of  mind  superior  to  others,  is  it  ever  because  of 
what  we  know  concerning  their  organic  antecedents?  No! 
it  is  always  for  two  entirely  different  reasons.  It  is  either 
because  we  take  an  immediate  delight  in  them;  or  else  it  is 
because  we  believe  them  to  bring  us  good  consequential 
fruits  for  life.  When  we  speak  disparagingly  of  "feverish 
fancies,"  surely  the  fever-process  as  such  is  not  the  ground  of 
our  disesteem — for  aught  we  know  to  the  contrary,  103°  or 
104°  Fahrenheit  might  be  a  much  more  favorable  temper- 
ature for  truths  to  germinate  and  sprout  in,  than  the  more 
ordinary  blood-heat  of  97  or  98  degrees.  It  is  either  the  dis- 
agreeableness  itself  of  the  fancies,  or  their  inability  to  bear 
the  criticisms  of  the  convalescent  hour.  When  we  praise  the 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  V] 

thoughts  which  health  brings,  health's  peculiar  chemical 
metabolisms  have  nothing  to  do  with  determining  our 
judgment.  We  know  in  fact  almost  nothing  about  these 
metabolisms.  It  is  the  character  of  inner  happiness  in  the 
thoughts  which  stamps  them  as  good,  or  else  their  consist- 
ency with  our  other  opinions  and  their  serviceability  for 
our  needs,  which  make  them  pass  for  true  in  our  esteem. 
Now  the  more  intrinsic  and  the  more  remote  of  these 
criteria  do  not  always  hang  together.  Inner  happiness  and 
serviceability  do  not  always  agree.  What  immediately  feels 
most  "good"  is  not  always  most  "true,"  when  measured  by 
the  verdict  of  the  rest  of  experience.  The  difference  between 
Philip  drunk  and  Philip  sober  is  the  classic  instance  in  cor- 
roboration. If  merely  "feeling  good"  could  decide,  drunk- 
enness would  be  the  supremely  valid  human  experience. 
But  its  revelations,  however  acutely  satisfying  at  the  mo- 
ment, are  inserted  into  an  environment  which  refuses  to 
bear  them  out  for  any  length  of  time.  The  consequence  of 
this  discrepancy  of  the  two  criteria  is  the  uncertainty  which 
still  prevails  over  so  many  of  our  spiritual  judgments. 
There  are  moments  of  sentimental  and  mystical  experi- 
ence— we  shall  hereafter  hear  much  of  them — that  carry 
an  enormous  sense  of  inner  authority  and  illumination  with 
them  when  they  come.  But  they  come  seldom,  and  they 
do  not  come  to  everyone;  and  the  rest  of  life  makes  either 
no  connection  with  them,  or  tends  to  contradict  them  more 
than  it  confirms  them.  Some  persons  follow  more  the  voice 
of  the  moment  in  these  cases,  some  prefer  to  be  guided  by 
the  average  results.  Hence  the  sad  discordancy  of  so  many 
of  the  spiritual  judgments  of  human  beings;  a  discordancy 
which  will  be  brought  home  to  us  acutely  enough  before 
these  lectures  end. 

It  is,  however,  a  discordancy  that  can  never  be  resolved 
by  any  merely  medical  test.  A  good  example  of  the  im- 


l8       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

possibility  of  holding  strictly  to  the  medical  tests  is  seen 
in  the  theory  of  the  pathological  causation  of  genius  pro- 
mulgated by  recent  authors.  "Genius,"  said  Dr.  Moreau, 
"is  but  one  of  the  many  branches  of  the  neuropathic  tree." 
"Genius,"  says  Dr.  Lombroso,  "is  a  symptom  of  hereditary 
degeneration  of  the  epileptoid  variety,  and  is  allied  to  moral 
insanity."  "Whenever  a  man's  life,"  writes  Mr.  Nisbet,  "is 
at  once  sufficiently  illustrious  and  recorded  with  sufficient 
fullness  to  be  a  subject  of  profitable  study,  he  inevitably 
falls  into  the  morbid  category.  .  .  .  And  it  is  worthy  of 
remark  that,  as  a  rule,  the  greater  the  genius,  the  greater 
the  unsoundness."  ^ 

Now  do  these  authors,  after  having  succeeded  in  estab- 
lishing to  their  own  satisfaction  that  the  works  of  genius 
are  fruits  of  disease,  consistently  proceed  thereupon  to  im- 
pugn the  value  of  the  fruits  .f*  Do  they  deduce  a  new  spir- 
itual judgment  from  their  new  doctrine  of  existential  con- 
ditions .f'  Do  they  frankly  forbid  us  to  admire  the  produc- 
tions of  genius  from  now  onwards.?  and  say  outright  that 
no  neuropath  can  ever  be  a  revealer  of  new  truth? 

No!  their  immediate  spiritual  instincts  are  too  strong 
for  them  here,  and  hold  their  own  against  inferences  which, 
in  mere  love  of  logical  consistency,  medical  materialism 
ought  to  be  only  too  glad  to  draw.  One  disciple  of  the 
school,  indeed,  has  striven  to  impugn  the  value  of  works 
of  genius  in  a  wholesale  way  (such  works  of  contemporary 
art,  namely,  as  he  himself  is  unable  to  enjoy,  and  they  are 
many)  by  using  medical  arguments."  But  for  the  most  part 
the  masterpieces  are  left  unchallenged;  and  the  medical 
line  of  attack  either  confines  itself  to  such  secular  produc- 
tions as  everyone  admits  to  be  intrinsically  eccentric,  or 
else  addresses  itself  exclusively  to  religious  manifestations. 

^  J.  F.  Nisbet:  The  Insanity  of  Genius,  3d  ed.,  London,  1893,  pp. 
xvi.,  xxiv. 

^  Max  Nordau,  in  his  bulky  book  entitled  Degetieration. 


RELIGION   AND   NEUROLOGY  ^9 

And  then  it  is  because  the  rehgious  manifestations  have 
been  already  condemned  because  the  critic  disHkes  them  on 
internal  or  spiritual  grounds. 

In  the  natural  sciences  and  industrial  arts  it  never  oc- 
curs to  anyone  to  try  to  refute  opinions  by  showing  up 
their  author's  neurotic  constitution.  Opinions  here  are  in- 
variably tested  by  logic  and  by  experiment,  no  matter  what 
may  be  their  author's  neurological  type.  It  should  be  no 
otherwise  with  religious  opinions.  Their  value  can  only  be 
ascertained  by  spiritual  judgments  directly  passed  upon 
them,  judgments  based  on  our  own  immediate  feeling 
primarily;  and  secondarily  on  what  we  can  ascertain  of 
their  experiential  relations  to  our  moral  needs  and  to  the 
rest  of  what  we  hold  as  true. 

Immediate  luminousness,  in  short,  philosophical  reason-^ 
ableness,  and  moral  helpfulness  are  the  only  available  cri- 
teria. Saint  Teresa  might  have  had  the  nervous  system  of 
the  placidest  cow,  and  it  would  not  now  save  her  theology, 
if  the  trial  of  the  theology  by  these  other  tests  should  show 
it  to  be  contemptible.  And  conversely  if  her  theology  can 
stand  these  other  tests,  it  will  make  no  difference  how  hys- 
terical or  nervously  off  her  balance  Saint  Teresa  may  have 
been  when  she  was  with  us  here  below. 

You  see  that  at  bottom  we  are  thrown  back  upon  the 
general  principles  by  which  the  empirical  philosophy  has 
always  contended  that  we  must  be  guided  in  our  search 
for  truth.  Dogmatic  philosophies  have  sought  for  tests  for 
truth  which  might  dispense  us  from  appealing  to  the  future. 
Some  direct  mark,  by  noting  which  we  can  be  protected 
immediately  and  absolutely,  now  and  forever,  against  all 
mistake — such  has  been  the -darling  dream  of  philosophic 
dogmatists.  It  is  clear  that  the  origin  of  the  truth  would  be 
an  admirable  criterion  of  this  sort,  if  only  the  various  or- 
igins could  be  discriminated  from  one  another  from  this 


20       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

point  of  view,  and  the  history  of  dogmatic  opinion  shows 
that  origin  has  always  been  a  favorite  test.  Origin  in  im- 
mediate intuition;  origin  in  pontifical  authority;  origin  in 
supernatural  revelation,  as  by  vision,  hearing,  or  unaccount- 
able impression;  origin  in  direct  possession  by  a  higher 
spirit,  expressing  itself  in  prophecy  and  warning;  origin  in 
automatic  utterance  generally — these  origins  have  been 
stock  warrants  for  the  truth  of  one  opinion  after  another 
which  we  find  represented  in  religious  history.  The  medical 
materialists  are  therefore  only  so  many  belated  dogmatists, 
neatly  turning  the  tables  on  their  predecessors  by  using  the 
criterion  of  origin  in  a  destructive  instead  of  an  accreditive 
way. 

They  are  effective  with  their  talk  of  pathological  origin 
only  so  long  as  supernatural  origin  is  pleaded  by  the  other 
side,  and  nothing  but  the  argument  from  origin  is  under 
discussion.  But  the  argument  from  origin  has  seldom  been 
used  alone,  for  it  is  too  obviously  insufficient.  Dr.  Mauds- 
ley  is  perhaps  the  cleverest  of  the  rebutters  of  supernatural 
religion  on  grounds  of  origin.  Yet  he  finds  himself  forced 
to  write: — 

"What  right  have  we  to  believe  Nature  under  any  obliga- 
tion to  do  her  work  by  means  of  complete  minds  only  ?  She 
may  find  an  incomplete  mind  a  more  suitable  instrument 
for  a  particular  purpose.  It  is  the  work  that  is  done,  and 
the  quality  in  the  worker  by  which  it  was  done,  that  is 
alone  of  moment;  and  it  may  be  no  great  matter  from  a 
cosmical  standpoint,  if  in  other  qualities  of  character  he 
was  singularly  defective — if  indeed  he  were  hypocrite,  adul- 
terer, eccentric,  or  lunatic.  .  .  .  Home  we  come  again, 
then,  to  the  old  and  last  resort  of  certitude — namely  the 
common  assent  of  mankind,  or  of  the  competent  by  instruc- 
tion and  training  among  mankind."  ^ 

^  H.  Maudsley:  Natural  Causes  and  Supernatural  Seemings,  1886, 
pp.  257,  256. 


RELIGION    AND   NEUROLOGY  21 

In  other  words,  not  its  origin,  but  the  way  in  which  it 
wor\s  on  the  whole,  is  Dr.  Maudsley's  final  test  of  a  belief. 
This  is  our  own  empiricist  criterion;  and  this  criterion  the 
stoutest  insisters  on  supernatural  origin  have  also  been 
forced  to  use  in  the  end.  Among  the  visions  and  messages 
some  have  always  been  too  patently  silly,  among  the  trances 
and  convulsive  seizures  some  have  been  too  fruitless  for 
conduct  and  character,  to  pass  themselves  off  as  significant, 
still  less  as  divine.  In  the  history  of  Christian  mysticism  the 
problem  how  to  discriminate  between  such  messages  and 
experiences  as  were  really  divine  miracles,  and  such  others 
as  the  demon  in  his  malice  was  able  to  counterfeit,  thus 
making  the  religious  person  twofold  more  the  child  of  hell 
he  was  before,  has  always  been  a  difficult  one  to  solve,  need- 
ing all  the  sagacity  and  experience  of  the  best  directors  of 
conscience.  In  the  end  it  had  to  come  to  our  empiricist  cri- 
terion: By  their  fruits  ye  shall  know  them,  not  by  their 
roots.  Jonathan  Edwards's  Treatise  on  Religious  Affections 
is  an  elaborate  working  out  of  this  thesis.  The  roots  of  a 
man's  virtue  are  inaccessible  to  us.  No  appearances  what- 
ever are  infallible  proofs  of  grace.  Our  practice  is  the.  only 
sure  evidence,  even  to  ourselves,  that  we  are  genuinely 
Christians. 

"In  forming  a  judgment  of  ourselves  now,"  Edwards  writes, 
"we  should  certainly  adopt  that  evidence  which  our  supreme 
Judge  will  chiefly  make  use  of  when  we  come  to  stand  before 
him  at  the  last  day.  .  .  .  There  is  not  one  grace  of  the  Spirit 
of  God,  of  the  existence  of  which,  in  any  professor  of  religion, 
Christian  practice  is  not  the  most  decisive  evidence.  .  .  .  The 
degree  in  which  our  experience  is  productive  of  practice  shows 
the  degree  in  which  our  experience  is  spiritual  and  divine." 

Catholic  writers  are  equally  emphatic.  The  good  disposi- 
tions which  a  vision,  or  voice,  or  other  apparent  heavenly 
favor  leave  behind  them  are  the  only  marks  by  which  we 


32       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

may  be  sure  they  are  not  possible  deceptions  of  the  tempter. 
Says  Saint  Teresa: — 

"Like  imperfect  sleep  which,  instead  of  giving  more  strength 
-o  the  head,  doth  but  leave  it  the  more  exhausted,  the  result  of 
mere  operations  of  the  imagination  is  but  to  weaken  the  soul. 
Instead  of  nourishment  and  energy  she  reaps  only  lassitude  and 
disgust:  whereas  a  genuine  heavenly  vision  yields  to  her  a  har- 
vest of  ineffable  spiritual  riches,  and  an  admirable  renewal  of 
bodily  strength.  I  alleged  these  reasons  to  those  who  so  often  ac- 
cused my  visions  of  being  the  work  of  the  enemy  of  mankind 
and  the  sport  of  my  imagination.  ...  I  showed  them  the  jew- 
els which  the  divine  hand  had  left  with  me: — they  .were  my 
actual  dispositions.  All  those  who  knew  me  saw  that  I  was 
changed;  my  confessor  bore  witness  to  the  fact;  this  improve- 
ment, palpable  in  all  respects,  far  from  being  hidden,  was  bril- 
liantly evident  to  all  men.  As  for  myself,  it  was  impossible  to 
believe  that  if  the  demon  were  its  author,  he  could  have  used,  in 
order  to  lose  me  and  lead  me  to  hell,  an  expedient  so  contrary 
to  his  own  interests  as  that  of  uprooting  my  vices,  and  filling  me 
with  masculine  courage  and  other  virtues  instead,  for  I  saw 
clearly  that  a  single  one  of  these  visions  was  enough  to  enrich 
me  with  all  that  wealth."  ^ 

I  fear  I  may  have  made  a  longer  excursus  than  was  nec- 
essary, and  that  fewer  words  would  have  dispelled  the  un^ 
easiness  which  may  have  arisen  among  some  of  you  as  I 
announced  my  pathological  programme.  At  any  rate  you 
must  all  be  ready  now  to  judge  the  religious  life  by  its  re- 
sults exclusively,  and  I  shall  assume  that  the  bugaboo  of 
morbid  origin  will  scandalize  your  piety  no  more. 

Still,  you  may  ask  me,  if  its  results  are  to  be  the  ground 
of  our  final  spiritual  estimate  of  a  religious  phenomenon, 
why  threaten  us  at  all  with  so  much  existential  study  of 
its  conditions?  Why  not  simply  leave  pathological  questions 
out.!^ 

'  Autobiography,  ch.  xxviii. 


RELIGION    AND   NEUROLOGY  23 

To  this  I  reply  in  two  ways:  First,  I  say,  irrepressible 
curiosity  imperiously  leads  one  on;  and  I  say,  secondly, 
that  it  always  leads  to  a  better  understanding  of  a  thing's 
significance  to  consider  its  exaggerations  and  perversions, 
its  equivalents  and  substitutes  and  nearest  relatives  else- 
where. Not  that  we  may  thereby  swamp  the  thing  in  the 
wholesale  condemnation  which  we  pass  on  its  inferior 
congeners,  but  rather  that  we  may  by  contrast  ascertain 
the  more  precisely  in  what  its  merits  consist,  by  learning 
at  the  same  time  to  what  particular  dangers  of  corruption  it 
may  also  be  exposed. 

Insane  conditions  have  this  advantage,  that  they  isolate 
special  factors  of  the  mental  life,  and  enable  us  to  inspect 
them  unmasked  by  their  more  usual  surroundings.  They 
play  the  part  in  mental  anatomy  which  the  scalpel  and 
the  microscope  play  in  the  anatomy  of  the  body.  To  under- 
■  stand  a  thing  rightly  we  need  to  see  it  both  out  of  its  en- 
vironment and  in  it,  and  to  have  acquaintance  with  the 
whole  range  of  its  variations.  The  study  of  hallucinations 
has  in  this  way  been  for  psychologists  the  key  to  their 
comprehension  of  normal  sensation,  that  of  illusions  has 
been  the  key  to  the  right  comprehension  of  perception. 
Morbid  impulses  and  imperative  conceptions,  "fixed  ideas," 
so  called,  have  thrown  a  flood  of  light  on  the  psychology 
of  the  normal  will;  and  obsessions  and  delusions  have  per- 
formed the  same  service  for  that  of  the  normal  faculty  oi 
belief. 

Similarly,  the  nature  of  genius  has  been  illuminated  by 
the  attempts,  of  which  I  already  made  mention,  to  class  it 
with  psychopathical  phenomena.  Borderland  insanity, 
crankiness,  insane  temperament,  loss  of  mental  balance, 
psycopathic  degeneration  (to  use  a  few  of  the  many  syno- 
nyms by  which  it  has  been  called),  has  certain  peculiarities 
and  liabilities  which,  when  combined  with  a  superior  qual- 
ity of  intellect  in  an  individual,  make  it  more  probable  that 


24       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

he  will  make  his  mark  and  afifcct  his  age,  than  if  his  tem- 
perament were  less  neurotic.  There  is  of  course  no  special 
affinity  between  crankiness  as  such  and  superior  intellect,^ 
for  most  psychopaths  have  feeble  intellects,  and  superior 
intellects  more  commonly  have  normal  nervous  systems. 
But  the  pyschopathic  temperament,  whatever  be  the  intellect 
with  which  it  finds  itself  paired,  often  brings  with  it  ardor 
and  excitability  of  character.  The  cranky  person  has  extraor- 
dinary emotional  susceptibility.  He  is  liable  to  fixed  ideas 
and  obsessions.  His  conceptions  tend  to  pass  immediately 
into  belief  and  action;  and  when  he  gets  a  new  idea,  he 
has  no  rest  till  he  proclaims  it,  or  ia  some  way  "works  it 
of?."  "What  shall  I  think  of  it?"  a  common  person  says  to 
himself  about  a  vexed  question;  but  in  a  "cranky"  mind 
"What  must  I  do  about  it.?"  is  the  form  the  question  tends 
to  take.  In  the  autobiography  of  that  high-souled  woman, 
Mrs.  Annie  Besant,  I  read  the  following  passage:  "Plenty 
of  people  wish  well  to  any  good  cause,  but  very  few  care 
to  exert  themselves  to  help  it,  and  still  fewer  will  risk  any- 
thing in  its  support.  'Someone  ought  to  do  it,  but  why 
should  I.'^'  is  the  ever  reechoed  phrase  of  weak-kneed  ami- 
ability. 'Someone  ought  to  do  it,  so  why  not  I?'  is  the  cry 
of  some  earnest  servant  of  man,  eagerly  forward  springing 
to  face  some  perilous  duty.  Between  these  two  sentences  lie 
whole  centuries  of  moral  evolution."  True  enough!  and 
between  these  two  sentences  lie  also  the  different  destinies 
of  the  ordinary  sluggard  and  the  psychopathic  man.  Thus, 
when  a  superior  intellect  and  a  psychopathic  temperament 
coalesce — as  in  the  endless  permutations  and  combinations 
of  human  faculty,  they  are  bound  to  coalesce  often  enough 
— in  the  same  individual,  we  have  the  best  possible  con- 
dition for  the  kind  of  effective  genius  that  gets  into  the 

^  Superior  intellect,  as  Professor  Bain  has  admirably  shown,  seems 
to  consist  in  nothing  so  much  as  in  a  large  development  of  the 
faculty  of  association  by  similarity. 


RELIGION    AND   NEUROLOGY  25 

biographical  dictionaries.  Such  men  do  not  remain  mere 
critics  and  understanders  with  their  intellect.  Their  ideai 
possess  them,  they  inflict  them,  for  better  or  worse,  upon 
their  companions  or  their  age.  It  is  they  who  get  counted 
when  Messrs.  Lombroso,  Nisbet,  and  others  invoke  statistics 
to  defend  their  paradox. 

To  pass  now  to  religious  phenomena,  take  the  melan- 
choly which,  as  we  shall  see,  constitutes  an  essential  moment 
in  every  complete  religious  evolution.  Take  the  happiness 
which  achieved  religious  belief  confers.  Take  the  trance- 
like  states  of  insight  into  truth  which  all  religious  mystics 
report.^  These  are  each  and  all  of  them  special  cases  of 
kinds  of  human  experience  of  much  wider  scope.  Religion? 
melancholy,  whatever  peculiarities  it  may  have  qua  reli- 
gious, is  at  any  rate  melancholy.  Religious  happiness  is  hap- 
piness. Religious  trance  is  trance.  And  the  moment  we 
renounce  the  absurd  notion  that  a  thing  is  exploded  away 
as  soon  as  it  is  classed  with  others,  or  its  origin  is  shown; 
the  moment  we  agree  to  stand  by  experimental  results  and 
inner  quality,  in  judging  of  values — who  does  not  see  that 
we  are  likely  to  ascertain  the  distinctive  significance  of 
religious  melancholy  and  happiness,  or  of  religious  trances, 
far  better  by  comparing  them  as  conscientiously  as  we  can 
with  other  varieties  of  melancholy,  happiness,  and  trance, 
than  by  refusing  to  consider  their  place  in  any  more  general 
series,  and  treating  them  as  if  they  were  outside  of  nature's 
order  altogether? 

I  hope  that  the  course  of  these  lectures  will  confirm  us 
in  this  supposition.  As  regards  the  psychopathic  origin  of 
so  many  religious  phenomena,  that  would  not  be  in  the 
least  surprising  or  disconcerting,  even  were  such  phe- 
nomena certified  from  on  high  to  be  the  most  precious  of 
human  experiences.  No  one  organism  can  possibly  yield 

^  I  may  refer  to  a  criticism  of  the  insanity  theory  of  genius  in  the 
Psychological  Review,  ii.  287  (1895). 


26       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

to  its  owner  the  whole  body  of  truth.  Few  of  us  are  not 
in  some  way  infirm,  or  eve;n  diseased;  and  our  very  in- 
firmities help  us  unexpectedly.  In  the  psychopathic  tempera- 
ment we  have  the  emotionality  which  is  the  sine  qua  non  of 
moral  perception;  we  have  the  intensity  and  tendency  to 
emphasis  which  are  the  essence  of  practical  moral  vigor;  and 
we  have  the  love  of  metaphysics  and  mysticism  which  carry 
one's  interests  beyond  the  surface  of  the  sensible  world. 
What,  then,  is  more  natural  than  that  this  temperament 
should  introduce  one  to  regions  of  religious  truth,  to  cor- 
ners of  the  universe,  which  your  robust  Philistine  type  of 
nervous  system,  forever  offering  its  biceps  to  be  felt,  thump- 
ing its  breast,  and  thanking  Heaven  that  it  hasn't  a  single 
morbid  fiber  in  its  composition,  would  be  sure  to  hide  for- 
ever from  its  self-satisfied  possessors? 

If  there  were  such  a  thing  as  inspiration  from  a  higher 
realm,  it  might  well  be  that  the  neurotic  temperament 
would  furnish  the  chief  condition  of  the  requisite  recep- 
tivity. And  having  said  thus  much,  I  think  that  I  may  let 
the  matter  of  religion  and  neuroticism  drop. 

The  mass  of  collateral  phenomena,  morbid  or  healthy, 
with  which  the  various  religious  phenomena  must  be  com- 
pared in  order  to  understand  them  better,  forms  what  in  the 
slang  of  pedagogics  is  termed  "the  apperceiving  mass"  by 
which  we  comprehend  them.  The  only  novelty  that  I  can 
imagine  this  course  of  lectures  to  possess  lies  in  the  breadth 
of  the  apperceiving  mass.  I  may  succeed  in  discussing  reli- 
gious experiences  in  a  wider  context  than  has  been  usual 
in  university  courses. 


Lecture  II 
CIRCUMSCRIPTION  OF  THE  TOPIC 

MOST  books  on  the  philosophy  of  religion  try  to  begin 
with  a  precise  definition  of  what  its  essence  consists 
of.  Some  of  these  would-be  definitions  may  possibly  come 
before  us  in  later  portions  of  this  course,  and  I  shall  not 
be  pedantic  enough  to  enumerate  any  of  them  to  you  now. 
Meanwhile  the  very  fact  that  they  are  so  many  and  so  differ- 
ent from  one  another  is  enough  to  prove  that  the  word  "reli- 
gion" cannot  stand  for  any  single  principle  or  essence,  but 
is  rather  a  collective  name.  The  theorizing  mind  tends  al- 
ways to  the  oversimplification  of  its  materials.  This  is  the 
root  of  all  that  absolutism  and  one-sided  dogmatism  by 
which  both  philosophy  and  religion  have  been  infested.  Let 
us  not  fall  immediately  into  a  one-sided  view  of  our  subject, 
but  let  us  rather  admit  freely  at  the  outset  that  we  may  very 
likely  find  no  one  essence,  but  many  characters  which  may 
alternately  be  equally  important  to  religion.  If  we  should 
inquire  for  the  essence  of  "government,"  for  example,  one 
man  might  tell  us  it  was  authority,  another  submission,  an- 
other  police,  another  an  army,  another  an  assembly,  an- 
other a  system  of  laws;  yet  all  the  while  it  would  be  true 
that  no  concrete  government  can  exist  without  all  these 
things,  one  of  which  is  more  important  at  one  moment  and 
others  at  another.  The  man  who  knows  governments  most 
completely  is  he  who  troubles  himself  least  about  a  defi- 
nition which  shall  give  their  essence.  Enjoying  an  intimate 
acquaintance  with  all  their  particularities  in  turn,  he  would 
naturally  regard  an  abstract  conception  in  which  these  were 

27 


28       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

unified  as  a  thing  more  misleading  than  enhghtening.  And 
why  may  not  rehgion  be  a  conception  equally  complex?^ 

Consider  also  the  "religious  sentiment"  which  we  see 
referred  to  in  so  many  books,  as  if  it  were  a  single  sort  of 
mental  entity. 

In  the  pyschologies  and  in  the  philosophies  of  religion, 
we  find  the  authors  attempting  to  specify  just  what  en- 
tity it  is.  One  man  allies  it  to  the  feeling  of  dependence; 
one  makes  it  a  derivative  from  fear;  others  connect  it  with 
the  sexual  life;  others  still  identify  it  with  the  feeUng  of 
the  infinite;  and  so  on.  Such  different  ways  of  conceiving 
it  ought  of  themselves  to  arouse  doubt  as  to  whether  it  pos- 
sibly can  be  one  specific  thing;  and  the  moment  we  are 
willing  to  treat  the  term  "religious  sentiment"  as  a  collec- 
tive name  for  the  many  sentiments  which  religious  objects 
may  arouse  in  alternation,  we  see  that  it  probably  contains 
nothing  whatever  of  a  psychologically  specific  nature. 
There  is  religious  fear,  religious  love,  religious  awe,  reli- 
gious joy,  and  so  forth.  But  religious  love  is  only  man's 
natural  emotion  of  love  directed  to  a  religious  object;  reli- 
gious fear  is  only  the  ordinary  fear  of  commerce,  so  to 
speak,  the  common  quaking  of  the  human  breast,  in  so  far 
as  the  notion  of  divine  retribution  may  arouse  it;  religious 
awe  is  the  same  organic  thrill  which  we  feel  in  a  forest  at 
twilight,  or  in  a  mountain  gorge;  only  this  time  it  comes 
over  us  at  the  thought  of  our  supernatural  relations;  and 
similarly  of  all  the  various  sentiments  which  may  be  called 
into  play  in  the  lives  of  religious  persons.  As  concrete  states 
of  mind,  made  up  of  a  feeling  plus  a  specific  sort  of  object, 
religious  emotions  of.  course  are  psychic  entities  distinguish- 

^  I  can  do  no  better  here  than  refer  my  readers  to  the  extended 
and  admirable  remarks  on  the  futihty  of  all  these  definitions  of  re- 
ligion, in  an  article  by  Professor  Leuba,  published  in  the  Monist  for 
January,  1901,  after  my  own  text  was  written. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF   THE   TOPIC  29 

able  from  other  concrete  emotions;  but  there  is  no  ground 
for  assuming  a  simple  abstract  "religious  emotion"  to  exist  as 
a  distinct  elementary  mental  affection  by  itself,  present  in 
.every  religious  experience  without  exception. 

As  there  thus  seems  to  be  no  one  elementary  religious 
emotion,  but  only  a  common  storehouse  of  emotions  upon 
which  religious  objects  may  draw,  so  there  might  conceiv- 
ably also  prove  to  be  no  one  specific  and  essential  kind  of 
religious  object,  and  no  one  specific  and  essential  kind  of 
religious  act. 

The  field  of  religion  being  as  wide  as  this,  it  is  mani- 
festly impossible  that  I  sholild  pretend  to  cover  it.  My  lec- 
tures must  be  limited  to  a  fraction  of  the  subject.  And,  al- 
though it  would  indeed  be  foolish  to  set  up  an  abstract 
definition  of  religion's  essence,  and  then  proceed  to  defend 
that  definition  against  all  comers,  yet  this  need  not  prevent 
me  from  taking  my  own  narrow  view  of  what  religion 
shall  consist  in  for  the  purpose  oj  these  lectures,  or,  out  of 
the  many  meanings  of  the  word,  from  choosing  the  one 
meaning  in  which  I  wish  to  interest  you  particularly,  and 
proclaiming  arbitrarily  that  when  I  say  "religion"  I  mean 
that.  This,  in  fact,  is  what  I  must  do,  and  I  will  now  pre- 
liminarily seek  to  mark  out  the  field  I  choose. 

One  way  to  mark  it  out  easily  is  to  say  what  aspects  of 
the  subject  we  leave  out.  At  the  outset  we  are  struck  by  one 
great  partition  which  divides  the  religious  field.  On  the  one 
side  of  it  lies  institutional,  on  the  other  personal  religion. 
As  M.  P.  Sabatier  says,  one  branch  of  religion  keeps  the 
divinity,  another  keeps  man  most  in  view.  Worship  and 
sacrifice,  procedures  for  working  on  the  dispositions  of  the 
deity,  theology  and  ceremony  and  ecclesiastical  organiza- 
tion, are  the  essentials  of  religion  in  the  institutional  branch. 
Were  we  to  limit  our  view  to  it,  we  should  have  to  define 
religion  as  an  external  art,  the  art  of  winning  the  favor  of 


30       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

the  gods.  In  the  more  personal  branch  of  rehgion  it  is  on 
the  contrary  the  inner  dispositions  of  man  himself  which 
form  the  center  of  interest,  his  conscience,  his  deserts,  his 
helplessness,  his  incompleteness.  And  although  the  favor  of 
the  God,  as  forfeited  or  gained,  is  still  an  essential  feature 
of  the  story,  and  theology  plays  a  vital  part  therein,  yet  the 
acts  to  which  this  sort  of  religion  prompts  are  personal  not 
ritual  acts,  the  individual  transacts  the  business  by  himself 
alone,  and  the  ecclesiastical  organization,  with  its  priests 
and  sacraments  and  other  go-betweens,  sinks  to  an  alto- 
gether secondary  place.  The  relation  goes  direct  from  heart 
lo  heart,  from  soul  to  soul,  between  man  and  his  maker. 

Now  in  these  lectures  I  propose  to  ignore  the  institutional 
branch  entirely,  to  say  nothing  of  the  ecclesiastical  organ- 
ization, to  consider  as  little  as  possible  the  systematic  the- 
ology and  the  ideas  about  the  gods  themselves,  and  to  con- 
fine myself  as  far  as  I  can  to  personal  religion  pure  and 
simple.  To  some  of  you  personal  religion,  thus  nakedly  con- 
sidered, will  no  doubt  seem  too  incomplete  a  thing  to  wear 
the  general  name.  "It  is  a  part  of  religion,"  you  will  say, 
^'but  only  its  unorganized  rudiment;  if  we  are  to  name 
it  by  itself,  we  had  better  call  it  man's  conscience  or  morality 
than  his  religion.  The  name  'religion'  should  be  reserved 
for  the  fully  organized  system  of  feeling,  thought,  and  in- 
stitution, for  the  Church,  in  short,  of  which  this  personal 
religion,  so  called,  is  but  a  fractional  element." 

But  if  you  say  this,  it  will  only  show  the  more  plainly 
how  much  the  question  of  definition  tends  to  become  a 
dispute  about  names.  Rather  than  prolong  such  a  dispute, 
I  am  willing  to  accept  almost  any  name  for  the  personal 
religion  of  which  I  propose  to  treat.  Call  it  conscience  or 
morality,  if  you  yourselves  prefer,  and  not  religion — under 
either  name  it  will  be  equally  worthy  of  our  study.  As  for 
myself,  I  think  it  will  prove  to  contain  some  elements  which 
morality  pure  and  simple  does  not  contain,  and  these  ele- 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF   THE   TOPIC  3I 

merits  I  shall  soon  seek  to  point  out;  so  I  will  myself  con- 
tinue to  apply  the  word  "religion"  to  it;  and  in  the  last 
lecture  of  all,  I  will  bring  in  the  theologies  and  the  ec- 
clesiasticisms,  and  say  something  of  its  relation  to  them. 

In  one  sense  at  least  the  personal  religion  will  prove 
itself  more  fundamental  than  either  theology  or  ecclesias- 
ticism.  Churches,  when  once  established,  live  at  second-han<l 
upon  tradition;  but  the  founders  of  every  church  owed  their 
power  originally  to  the  fact  of  their  direct  personal  com' 
munion  with  the  divine.  Not  only  the  superhuman  found- 
ers, the  Christ,  the  Buddha,  Mahomet,  but  all  the  origi- 
nators of  Christian  sects  have  been  in  this  case; — so  personal 
religion  should  still  seem  the  primordial  thing,  even  to  those 
who  continue  to  esteem  it  incomplete. 

There  are,  it  is  true,  other  things  in  religion  chrono- 
logically more  primordial  than  personal  devoutness  in  the 
moral  sense.  Fetishism  and  magic  seem  to  have  preceded 
inward  piety  historically — at  least  our  records  of  inward 
piety  do  not  reach  back  so  far.  And  if  fetishism  and  magic 
be  regarded  as  stages  of  religion,  one  may  say  that  personal 
religion  in  the  inward  sense  and  the  genuinely  spiritual 
ecclesiasticisms  which  it  founds  are  phenomena  of  secon- 
dary or  even  tertiary  order.  But,  quite  apart  from  the  fact 
that  many  anthropologists — for  instance,  Jevons  and  Frazer 
— expressly  oppose  "religion"  and  "magic"  to  each  other, 
it  is  certain  that  the  whole  system  of  thought  which  leads 
to  magic,  fetishism,  and  the  lower  superstitions  may  just  as 
well  be  called  primitive  science  as  called  primitive  religion. 
The  question  thus  becomes  a  verbal  one  again;  and  our 
knowledge  of  all  these  early  stages  of  thought  and  feeling 
is  in  any  case  so  conjectural  and  imperfect  that  farther  dis- 
cussion would  not  be  worth  while. 

Religion,  therefore,  as  I  now  ask  you  arbitrarily  to  take 
it,  shall  mean  for  us  the  feelings,  acts,  and  experiences  of 
individual  men  in  their  solitude,  so  far  as  they  apprehend 


32       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

themselves  to  stand  in  relation  to  whatever  they  may  con- 
sider the  divine.  Since  the  relation  may  be  either  moral, 
physical,  or  ritual,  it  is  evident  that  out  of  religion  in  the 
sense  in  which  we  take  it,  theologies,  philosophies,  and  ec- 
clesiastical organizations  may  secondarily  grow.  In  these 
lectures,  however,  as  I  have  already  said,  the  immediate 
personal  experiences  will  amply  fill  our  time,  and  we  shall 
hardly  consider  theology  or  ecclesiasticism  at  all. 

We  escape  much  controversial  matter  by  this  arbitrary 
definition  of  our  field.  But,  still,  a  chance  of  controversy 
comes  up  over  the  word  "divine,"  if  we  take  the  defi- 
nition in  too  narrow  a  sense.  There  are  systems  of  thought 
which  the  world  usually  calls  religious,  and  yet  which  do 
not  positively  assume  a  God.  Buddhism  is  in  this  case.  Pop- 
ularly, of  course,  the  Buddha  himself  stands  in  place  of  a 
God;  but  in  strictness  the  Buddhistic  system  is  atheistic. 
Modern  transcendental  idealism,  Emersonianism,  for  in- 
stance, also  seems  to  let  God  evaporate  into  abstract  Ideality. 
Not  a  deity  in  concreto,  not  a  superhuman  person,  but  the 
immanent  divinity  in  things,  the  essentially  spiritual  struc- 
ture of  the  universe,  is  the  object  of  the  transcendcntalist 
lult.  In  that  address  to  the  graduating  class  at  Divinity 
College  in  1838  which  made  Emerson  famous,  the  frank 
expression  of  this  worship  of  mere  abstract  laws  was  what 
made  the  scandal  of  the  performance. 

"These  laws,"  said  the  speaker,  "execute  themselves.  They 
are  out  of  time,  out  of  space,  and  not  subject  to  circumstance: 
Thus,  in  the  soul  of  man  there  is  a  justice  whose  retributions 
are  instant  and  entire.  He  who  does  a  good  deed  is  instantly  en- 
nobled. He  who  does  a  mean  deed  is  by  the  action  itself  con- 
tracted. He  who  puts  off  impurity  thereby  puts  on  purity.  If  a 
man  is  at  heart  just,  then  in  so  far  is  he  God;  the  safety  of  God, 
the  immortality  of  God,  the  majesty  of  God,  do  enter  into  that 
man  with  justice.  If  a  man  dissemble,  deceive,  he  deceives  him- 
self, and  goes  out  of  acquaintance  with  his  own  being.  Charac- 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION   OF  THE  TOPIC  33 

ter  is  always  known.  Thefts  never  enrich;  alms  never  im- 
poverish; murder  will  speak  out  of  stone  walls.  The  least  ad- 
mixture of  a  lie — for  example,  the  taint  of  vanity,  any  attempt 
to  make  a  good  impression,  a  favorable  appearance — will  in- 
stantly vitiate  the  effect.  But  speak  the  truth,  and  all  things  alive 
or  brute  are  vouchers,  and  the  very  roots  of  the  grass  under- 
ground there  do  seem  to  stir  and  move  to  bear  your  witness.  For 
all  things  proceed  out  of  the  same  spirit,  which  is  differently 
named  love,  justice,  temperance,  in  its  different  applications, 
just  as  the  ocean  receives  different  names  on  the  several  shores 
which  it  washes.  In  so  far  as  he  roves  from  these  ends,  a  man 
bereaves  himself  of  power,  of  auxiliaries.  His  being  shrinks  .  .  ^ 
he  becomes  less  and  less,  a  mote,  a  point,  until  absolute  badness 
is  absolute  death.  The  perception  of  this  law  awakens  in  the 
mind  a  sentiment  which  we  call  the  religious  sentiment,  and 
which  makes  our  highest  happiness.  Wonderful  is  its  power  to 
charm  and  to  command.  It  is  a  mountain  air.  It  is  the  embalmef 
of  the  world.  It  makes  the  sky  and  the  hills  sublime,  and  the 
silent  song  of  the  stars  is  it.  It  is  the  beatitude  of  man.  It  makes 
him  illimitable.  When  he  says  *I  ought';  when  love  warns  him; 
when  he  chooses,  warned  from  on  high,  the  good  and  great 
deed;  then,  deep  melodies  wander  through  his  soul  from  su 
premc  wisdom.  Then  he  can  worship,  and  be  enlarged  by  his 
worship;  for  he  can  never  go  behind  this  sentiment.  All  the  ex- 
pressions of  this  sentiment  are  sacred  and  permanent  in  propor 
tion  to  their  purity.  [They]  affect  us  more  than  all  other  com 
positions.  The  sentences  of  the  olden  time,  which  ejaculate  thiv 
piety,  are  still  fresh  and  fragrant.  And  the  unique  impression 
of  Jesus  upon  mankind,  v/hose  name  is  not  so  much  written 
as  ploughed  into  the  history  of  this  world,  is  proof  of  the 
subtle  virtue  of  this  infusion."  -^ 

Such  is  the  Emersonian  religion.  The  universe  has  a 
divine  soul  of  order,  w^hich  soul  is  moral,  being  also  the 
soul  within  the  soul  of  man.  But  whether  this  soul  of  the 
universe  be  a  mere  quality  like  the  eye's  brilliancy  or  the 
skin's  softness,  or  whether  it  be  a  self-conscious  life  like  the 


fc 


Miscellanies,  1868,  p.  120  (abridged). 


34       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

eye's  seeing  or  the  skin's  feeling,  is  a  decision  that  never 
unmistakably  appears  in  Emerson's  pages.  It  quivers  on 
the  boundary  of  these  things,  sometimes  leaning  one  way, 
sometimes  the  other,  to  suit  the  literary  rather  than  the 
philosophic  need.  Whatever  it  is,  though,  it  is  active.  As 
much  as  if  it  were  a  God,  we  can  trust  it  to  protect  all 
ideal  interests  and  keep  the  world's  balance  straight.  The 
sentences  in  which  Emerson,  to  the  very  end,  gave  utter- 
ance to  this  faith  are  as  fine  as  anything  in  literature:  "If 
you  love  and  serve  men,  you  cannot  by  any  hiding  or  strat- 
agem escape  the  remuneration.  Secret  retributions  are  al- 
ways restoring  the  level,  when  disturbed,  of  the  divine 
justice.  It  is  impossible  to  tilt  the  beam.  All  the  tyrants  and 
proprietors  and  monopolists  of  the  world  in  vain  set  their 
shoulders  to  heave  the  bar.  Settles  forevermore  the  ponder- 
ous equator  to  its  line,  and  man  and  mote,  and  star  and  sun, 
must  range  to  it,  or  be  pulverized  by  the  recoil."  ^ 

Now  it  would  be  too  absurd  to  say  that  the  inner  ex- 
periences that  underlie  such  expressions  of  faith  as  this  and 
impel  the  writer  to  their  utterance  are  quite  unworthy  to  be 
called  religious  experiences.  The  sort  of  appeal  that  Emer- 
sonian optimism,  on  the  one  hand,  and  Buddhistic  pessi- 
mism, on  the  other,  make  to  the  individual  and  the  sort 
of  response  which  he  makes  to  them  in  his  life  are  in  fact 
indistinguishable  from,  and  in  many  respects  identical 
with,  the  best  Christian  appeal  and  response.  We  must 
'herefore,  from  the  experiential  point  of  view,  call  these 
godless  or  quasi-godless  creeds  "religions";  and  accordingly 
when  in  our  definition  of  religion  we  sneak  of  the  indi- 
vidual's relation  to  "what  he  considers  the  divine,"  we  must 
interpret  the  term  "divine"  very  broadly,  as  denoting  any 
object  that  is  godlike,  whether  it  be  a  concrete  deity  or  not. 

'^Lectures  and  Biographical  Sketches,  1868,  p.  186. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION   OF   THE   TOPIC  3f< 

But  the  term  "godlike,"  if  thus  treated  as  a  floating  gen- 
eral quality,  becomes  exceedingly  vague,  for  many  gods 
have  flourished  in  religious  history,  and  their  attributes 
have  been  discrepant  enough.  What  then  is  that  essentially 
godlike  quality — be  it  embodied  in  a  concrete  deity  or  not 
— our  relation  to  which  determines  our  character  as  reli- 
gious men?  It  will  repay  us  to  seek  some  answer  to  this 
question  before  we  proceed  farther. 

For  one  thing,  gods  are  conceived  to  be  first  things  in 
the  way  of  being  and  power.  They  overarch  and  envelop, 
and  from  them  there  is  no  escape.  What  relates  to  them 
is  the  first  and  last  word  in  the  way  of  truth.  Whatever  then 
were  most  primal  and  enveloping  and  deeply  true  might 
at  this  rate  be  treated  as  godlike,  and  a  man's  religion  might 
thus  be  identified  with  his  attitude,  whatever  it  might  be, 
toward  what  he  felt  to  be  the  primal  truth. 

Such  a  definition  as  this  would  in  a  way  be  defensible 
Religion,  whatever  it  is,  is  a  man's  total  reaction  upon  life 
so  why  not  say  that  any  total  reaction  upon  life  is  a  reli- 
gion.'^ Total  reactions  are  different  from  casual  reactions, 
and  total  attitudes  are  different  from  usual  or  professional 
attitudes.  To  get  at  them  you  must  go  behind  the  fore- 
ground of  existence  and  reach  down  to  that  curious  sense 
of  the  whole  residual  cosmos  as  an  everlasting  presence, 
intimate  or  alien,  terrible  or  amusing,  lovable  or  odious, 
which  in  some  degree  everyone  possesses.  This  sense  of  the 
world's  presence,  appealing  as  it  does  to  our  peculiar  indi- 
vidual temperament,  makes  us  either  strenuous  or  careless, 
devout  or  blasphemous,  gloomy  or  exultant,  about  life  at 
large;  and  our  reaction,  involuntary  and  inarticulate  and 
often  half  unconscious  as  it  is,  is  the  completest  of  all  our 
answers  to  the  question,  "What  is  the  character  of  this  uni- 
verse in  which  we  dwell?"  It  expresses  our  individual  sense 
of  it  in  the  most  definite  way.  Why  then  not  call  these  reac- 


56      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tions  our  religion,  no  matter  what  specific  character  they 
may  have?  Non-rehgious  as  some  of  these  reactions  may  be, 
in  one  sense  of  the  word  "rehgious,"  they  yet  belong  to  the 
general  sphere  of  the  religious  life,  and  so  should  generically 
be  classed  as  religious  reactions.  "He  believes  in  No-God, 
and  he  worships  him,"  said  a  colleague  of  mine  of  a  student 
who  was  manifesting  a  fine  atheistic  ardor;  and  the  more 
fervent  opponents  of  Christian  doctrine  have  often  enough 
shown  a  temper  which,  psychologically  considered,  is  in- 
distinguishable from  religious  zeal. 

But  so  very  broad  a  use  of  the  word  "religion"  would  be 
inconvenient,  however  defensible  it  might  remain  on  logical 
grounds.  There  are  trifling,  sneering  attitudes  even  toward 
the  whole  of  life;  and  in  some  men  these  attitudes  are  final 
and  systematic.  It  would  strain  the  ordinary  use  of  language 
\oo  much  to  call  such  attitudes  religious,  even  though,  from 
the  point  of  view  of  an  unbiased  critical  philosophy,  they 
might  conceivably  be  perfectly  reasonable  ways  of  looking 
upon  life.  Voltaire,  for  example,  writes  thus  to  a  friend,  at 
the  age  of  seventy-three:  "As  for  myself,"  he  says,  "weak  as 
I  am,  I  carry  on  the  war  to  the  last  moment,  I  get  a  hundred 
pike-thrusts,  I  return  two  hundred,  and  I  laugh.  I  see  near 
my  door  Geneva  on  fire  with  quarrels  over  nothing,  and  I 
laugh  again;  and,  thank  God,  I  can  look  upon  the  world  as 
a  farce  even  when  it  becomes  as  tragic  as  it  sometimes  does. 
All  comes  out  even  at  the  end  of  the  day,  and  all  comes  out 
still  more  even  when  all  the  days  are  over." 

Much  as  we  may  admire  such  a  robust  old  gamecock 
spirit  in  a  valetudinarian,  to  call  it  a  religious  spirit  would 
be  odd.  Yet  it  is  for  the  moment  Voltaire's  reaction  on  the 
whole  of  life,  fe  m'en  fiche  is  the  vulgar  French  equivalent 
for  our  English  ejaculation  "Who  cares.?"  And  the  happy 
term  je  men  fichisme  recently  has  been  invented  to  desig- 
.late  the  systematic  determination  not  to  take  anything  in 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION   OF  THE  TOPIC  37 

life  too  solemnly.  "All  is  vanity"  is  the  relieving  w^ord  in  all 
difficult  crises  for  this  mode  of  thought,  which  that  exqui- 
site literary  genius  Renan  took  pleasure,  in  his  later  days  of 
sw^eet  decay,  in  putting  into  coquettishly  sacrilegious  forms 
which  remain  to  us  as  excellent  expressions  of  the  "all  is 
vanity"  state  of  mind.  Take  the  following  passage,  for  ex- 
ample— we  must  hold  to  duty,  even  against  the  evidence. 
Renan  says — but  he  then  goes  on: — 

"There  are  many  chances  that  the  world  may  be  nothing  but 
a  fairy  pantomime  of  which  no  God  has  care.  We  must  there- 
fore arrange  ourselves  so  that  on  neither  hypothesis  we  shall  be 
completely  wrong.  We  must  listen  to  the  superior  voices,  buf 
in  such  a  way  that  if  the  second  hypothesis  were  true  we  should 
not  have  been  too  completely  duped.  If  in  effect  the  world  b( 
not  a  serious  thing,  it  is  the  dogmatic  people  who  will  be  the 
shallow  ones,  and  the  worldly  minded  whom  the  theologians 
now  call  frivolous  will  be  those  who  are  really  wise. 

"In  utrumque  paratus,  then.  Be  ready  for  anything — that 
perhaps  is  wisdom.  Give  ourselves  up,  according  to  the  hour, 
to  confidence,  to  skepticism,  to  optimism,  to  irony,  and  we  may 
be  sure  that  at  certain  moments  at  least  we  shall  be  with  the 
truth.  .  .  .  Good-humor  is  a  philosophic  state  of  mind;  il 
seems  to  say  to  Nature  that  we  take  her  no  more  seriously  than 
she  takes  us.  I  maintain  that  one  should  always  talk  of  philos- 
ophy  with  a  smile.  We  owe  it  to  the  Eternal  to  be  virtuous; 
but  we  have  the  right  to  add  to  this  tribute  our  irony  as  a  sort 
of  personal  reprisal.  In  this  way  we  return  to  the  right  quarter 
jest  for  jest;  we  play  the  trick  that  has  been  played  on  us.  Saint 
Augustine's  phrase:  Lord,  if  we  are  deceived,  it  is  by  thee!  re- 
mains a  fine  one,  well  suited  to  our  modern  feeling.  Only  we 
wish  the  Eternal  to  know  that  if  we  accept  the  fraud,  we  accept 
it  knowingly  and  willingly.  We  are  resigned  in  advance  to 
losing  the  interest  on  our  investments  of  virtue,  but  we  wish 
not  to  appear  ridiculous  by  having  counted  on  them  too  se- 
curely."^ 

1  Feuilles  detachees,  pp.  394-398  (abridged). 


38       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Surely  all  the  usual  associations  of  the  word  "religion" 
would  have  to  be  stripped  away  if  such  a  systematic  parti 
pris  of  irony  were  also  to  be  denoted  by  the  name.  For 
common  men  "religion,"  whatever  more  special  meanings 
it  may  have,  signifies  always  a  serious  state  of  mind.  If  any 
one  phrase  could  gather  its  universal  message,  that  phrase 
would  be,  "All  is  not  vanity  in  this  Universe,  whatever  the 
appearances  may  suggest."  If  it  can  stop  anything,  religion 
as  commonly  apprehended  can  stop  just  such  chaffing  talk 
as  Kenan's.  It  favors  gravity,  not  pertness;  it  says  "hush"  to 
all  vain  chatter  and  smart  wit. 

But  if  hostile  to  light  irony,  religion  is  equally  hostile 
to  heavy  grumbling  and  complaint.  The  world  appears 
tragic  enough  in  some  religions,  but  the  tragedy  is  real- 
ized as  purging,  and  a  way  of  deliverance  is  held  to  exist. 
We  shall  see  enough  of  the  religious  melancholy  in  a  fu- 
ture lecture;  but  melancholy,  according  to  our  ordinary  use 
of  language,  forfeits  all  title  to  be  called  religious  when,  in 
Marcus  Aurelius's  racy  words,  the  sufferer  simply  lies  kick- 
ing and  screaming  after  the  fashion  of  a  sacrificed  pig.  The 
mood  of  a  Schopenhauer  or  a  Nietzsche — and  in  a  less  de- 
gree one  may  sometimes  say  the  same  of  our  own  sad  Car- 
lyle — though  often  an  ennobling  sadness,  is  almost  as  often 
only  peevishness  running  away  with  the  bit  between  its 
teeth.  The  sallies  of  the  two  German  authors  remind  one, 
half  the  time,  of  the  sick  shriekings  of  two  dying  rats.  They 
lack  the  purgatorial  note  which  religious  sadness  gives  forth. 

There  must  be  something  solemn,  serious,  and  tender 
about  any  attitude  which  we  denominate  religious.  If  glad, 
it  must  not  grin  or  snicker;  if  sad,  it  must  not  scream  or 
curse.  It  is  precisely  as  being  solemn  experiences  that  I  wish 
to  interest  you  in  religious  experiences.  So  I  propose — arbi- 
trarily again,  if  you  please — to  narrow  our  definition  once 
more  by  saying  that  the  word  "divine,"  as  employed  therein, 
shall  mean  for  us  not  merely  the  primal  and  enveloping 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF   THE   TOPIC  39 

and  real,  for  that  meaning  if  taken  without  restriction 
might  prove  too  broad.  The  divine  shall  mean  for  us  only 
such  a  primal  reality  as  the  individual  feels  impelled  to 
respond  to  solemnly  and  gravely,  and  neither  by  a  curse 
nor  a  jest. 

But  solemnity,  and  gravity,  and  all  such  emotional  at- 
tributes, admit  of  various  shades;  and,  do  what  we  will 
with  our  defining,  the  truth  must  at  last  be  confronted  that 
we  are  dealing  with  a  field  of  experience  where  there  is  not 
a  single  conception  that  can  be  sharply  drawn.  The  pre- 
tension, under  such  conditions,  to  be  rigorously  "scientific" 
or  "exact"  in  our  terms  would  only  stamp  us  as  lacking  in 
understanding  of  our  task.  Things  are  more  or  less  divine, 
states  of  mind  are  more  or  less  religious,  reactions  are  more 
or  less  total,  but  the  boundaries  are  always  misty,  and  it  is 
everywhere  a  question  of  amount  and  degree.  Nevertheless, 
at  their  extreme  of  development,  there  can  never  be  any  ques- 
tion as  to  what  experiences  are  religious.  The  divinity  of  the 
object  and  the  solemnity  of  the  reaction  are  too  well  marked 
for  doubt.  Hesitation  as  to  whether  a  state  of  mind  is  "reli- 
gious," or  "irreligious,"  or  "moral,"  or  "philosophical,"  is  only 
likely  to  arise  when  the  state  of  mind  is  weakly  character- 
ized, but  in  that  case  it  will  be  hardly  worthy  of  our  study 
at  all.  With  states  that  can  only  by  courtesy  be  called  reli- 
gious we  need  have  nothing  to  do,  our  only  profitable  busi- 
ness being  with  what  nobody  can  possibly  feel  tempted  to 
call  anything  else.  I  said  in  my  former  lecture  that  we  learn 
most  about  a  thing  when  we  view  it  under  a  microscope, 
as  it  were,  or  in  its  most  exaggerated  form.  This  is  as  true  of 
religious  phenomena  as  of  any  other  kind  of  fact.  The  only 
cases  likely  to  be  profitable  enough  to  repay  our  attention 
will  therefore  be  cases  where  the  religious  spirit  is  unmistak- 
able and  extreme.  Its  fainter  manifestations  we  may  tran> 
quilly  pass  by.  Here,  for  example,  is  the  total  reaction  upon 
life  of  Frederick  Locker  Lampson,  whose  autobiography, 


40       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

entitled  "Confidences,"  proves  him  to  have  been  a  most 
amiable  man. 

"I  am  so  far  resigned  to  my  lot  that  I  feel  small  pain  at  the 
thought  of  having  to  part  from  what  has  been  called  the  pleas- 
ant habit  of  existence,  the  sweet  fable  of  life.  I  would  not 
care  to  live  my  wasted  life  over  again,  and  so  to  prolong  my 
span.  Strange  to  say,  I  have  but  little  wish  to  be  younger.  I 
submit  with  a  chill  at  my  heart.  I  humbly  submit  because  it 
is  the  Divine  Will,  and  my  appointed  destiny.  I  dread  the  in- 
crease of  infirmities  that  will  make  me  a  burden  to  those  around 
me,  those  dear  to  me.  No!  let  me  slip  av/ay  as  quietly  and 
:omfortably  as  I  can.  Let  the  end  come,  if  peace  come  with  it. 

"I  do  not  know  that  there  is  a  great  deal  to  be  said  for  this 
world,  or  our  sojourn  here  upon  it;  but  it  has  pleased  God  so 
to  place  us,  and  it  must  please  me  also.  I  ask  you,  what  is 
human  life?  Is  not  it  a  maimed  happiness — care  and  weari- 
ness, weariness  and  care,  with  the  baseless  expectation,  the 
strange  cozenage  of  a  brighter  to-morrow?  At  best  it  is  but  a 
froward  child,  that  must  be  played  with  and  humored,  to  keep 
it  quiet  till  it  falls  asleep,  and  then  the  care  is  over."^ 

This  is  a  complex,  a  tender,  a  submissive,  and  a  graceful 
state  of  mind.  For  myself,  I  should  have  no  objection  to 
tailing  it  on  the  whole  a  religious  state  of  mind,  although 
I  dare  say  that  to  many  of  you  it  may  seem  too  listless  and 
half-hearted  to  merit  so  good  a  name.  But  what  matters 
it  in  the  end  whether  we  call  such  a  state  of  mind  religious 
or  not?  It  is  too  insignificant  for  our  instruction  in  any 
case;  and  its  very  possessor  wrote  it  down  in  terms  which 
he  would  not  have  used  unless  he  had  been  thinking  of 
more  energetically  religious  moods  in  others,  with  which 
he  found  himself  unable  to  compete.  It  is  with  these  more 
energetic  states  that  our  sole  business  lies,  and  we  can  per- 
fectly well  afford  to  let  the  minor  notes  and  the  uncertain 
border  go. 

^  Op.  cit.,  pp.  314,  313. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION   OF  THE  TOPIC  4I 

It  was  the  extremer  cases  that  I  had  in  mind  a  little  while 
ago  when  I  said  that  personal  religion,  even  without  the- 
ology or  ritual,  would  prove  to  embody  some  elements  that 
morality  pure  and  simple  does  not  contain.  You  may  re- 
member that  I  promised  shortly  to  point  out  what  those  ele- 
ments were.  In  a  general  way  I  can  now  say  what  I  ha(, 
in  mind. 

"I  accept  the  universe"  is  reported  to  have  been  a  favorile 
utterance  of  our  New  England  transcendentalist,  Margaret 
Fuller;  and  when  some  one  repeated  this  phrase  to  Thomas 
Carlyle,  his  sardonic  comment  is  said  to  have  been:  "Cad! 
she'd  better!"  At  bottom  the  whole  concern  of  both  morality 
and  religion  is  with  the  manner  of  our  acceptance  of  the 
universe.  Do  we  accept  it  only  in  part  and  grudgingly,  or 
heartily  and  altogether?  Shall  our  protests  against  certain 
things  in  it  be  radical  and  unforgiving,  or  shall  we  think 
that,  even  with  evil,  there  are  ways  of  living  that  must  lead 
to  good?  If  we  accept  the  whole,  shall  we  do  so  as  if  stunned 
into  submission — as  Carlyle  would  have  us — "Gad!  we'd 
better!" — or  shall  we  do  so  with  enthusiastic  assent?  Moral- 
ity pure  and  simple  accepts  the  law  of  the  whole  which  it 
finds  reigning,  so  far  as  to  acknowledge  and  obey  it,  but 
it  may  obey  it  with  the  heaviest  and  coldest  heart,  and  never 
cease  to  feel  it  as  a  yoke.  But  for  religion,  in  its  strong  and 
fully  developed  manifestations,  the  service  of  the  highest 
never  is  felt  as  a  yoke.  Dull  submission  is  left  far  behind, 
and  a  mood  of  welcome,  which  may  fill  any  place  on  the 
scale  between  cheerful  serenity  and  enthusiastic  gladness, 
has  taken  its  place. 

It  makes  a  tremendous  emotional  and  practical  difference 
to  one  whether  one  accept  the  universe  in  the  drab  discol- 
ored way  of  stoic  resignation  to  necessity,  or  with  the  pas- 
sionate happiness  of  Christian  saints.  The  difFerence  is  as 
great  as  that  between  passivity  and  activity,  as  that  between 


42       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

the  defensive  and  the  aggressive  mood.  Gradual  as  are  the 
steps  by  which  an  individual  may  grow  from  one  state  into 
the  other,  many  as  are  the  intermediate  stages  which  differ- 
ent individuals  represent,  yet  when  you  place  the  typical 
extremes  beside  each  other  for  comparison,  you  feel  that 
two  discontinuous  psychological  universes  confront  you,  and 
that  in  passing  from  one  to  the  other  a  "critical  point"  has 
been  overcome. 

If  we  compare  stoic  with  Christian  ejaculations  we  see 
much  more  than  a  difference  of  doctrine;  rather  is  it  a  dif- 
ference of  emotional  mood  that  parts  them.  When  Marcus 
Aurelius  reflects  on  the  eternal  reason  that  has  ordered 
things,  there  is  a  frosty  chill  about  his  words  which  you 
rarely  find  in  a  Jewish,  and  never  in  a  Christian  piece  of 
religious  writing.  The  universe  is  "accepted"  by  all  these 
writers;  but  how  devoid  of  passion  or  exultation  the  spirit 
of  the  Roman  Emperor  is!  Compare  his  fine  sentence:  "If 
gods  care  not  for  me  or  my  children,  here  is  a  reason  for 
it,"  with  Job's  cry:  "Though  he  slay  me,  yet  will  I  trust  in 
him!"  and  you  immediately  see  the  difference  I  mean.  The 
anima  mundi,  to  whose  disposal  of  his  own  personal  des- 
tiny the  Stoic  consents,  is  there  to  be  respected  and  sub- 
mitted to,  but  the  Christian  God  is  there  to  be  loved;  and 
the  difference  of  emotional  atmosphere  is  like  that  between 
an  arctic  climate  and  the  tropics,  though  the  outcome  in  the 
way  of  accepting  actual  conditions  uncomplainingly  may 
seem  in  abstract  terms  to  be  much  the  same. 

"It  is  a  man's  duty,"  says  Marcus  Aurelius,  "to  comfort 
himself  and  wait  for  the  natural  dissolution,  and  not  to  be 
vexed,  but  to  find  refreshment  solely  in  these  thoughts — first 
that  nothing  will  happen  to  me  which  is  not  conformable  to  the 
nature  of  the  universe;  and  secondly  that  I  need  do  nothing 
contrary  to  the  God  and  deity  within  me;  for  there  is  no  man 
who  can  compel  me  to  transgress.^  He  is  an  abscess  on  the 
universe  who  withdraws  and  separates  himself  from  the  reason 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF    THE   TOPIC  43 

of  our  common  nature,  through  being  displeased  with  the  things 
which  happen.  For  the  same  nature  produces  these,  and  has 
produced  thee  too.  And  so  accept  everything  which  happens, 
even  if  it  seem  disagreeable,  because  it  leads  to  this,  the  health 
of  the  universe  and  to  the  prosperity  and  felicity  of  Zeus.  For 
he  would  not  have  brought  on  any  man  what  he  has  brought, 
if  it  were  not  useful  for  the  vv^hole.  The  integrity  of  the  whole 
is  mutilated  if  thou  cuttest  ofif  anything.  And  thou  dost  cut 
oflf,  as  far  as  it  is  in  thy  power,  when  thou  art  dissatisfied,  and 
in  a  manner  triest  to  put  anything  out  of  the  way."^ 

Compare  now  this  mood  with  that  of  the  old  Christian 
author  of  the  Theologia  Germanica: — 

"Where  men  are  enlightened  with  the  true  light,  they  re- 
nounce all  desire  and  choice,  and  commit  and  commend  them- 
selves and  all  things  to  the  eternal  Goodness,  so  that  every 
enlightened  man  could  say:  'I  would  fain  be  to  the  Eternal 
Goodness  what  his  own  hand  is  to  a  man.'  Such  men  are  in 
a  state  of  freedom,  because  they  have  lost  the  fear  of  pain  or 
hell,  and  the  hope  of  reward  or  heaven,  and  are  living  in  pure 
submission  to  the  eternal  Goodness,  in  the  perfect  freedom  of 
fervent  love.  When  a  man  truly  perceiveth  and  considereth 
himself,  who  and  what  he  is,  and  findeth  himself  utterly  vile 
and  wicked  and  unworthy,  he  falleth  into  such  a  deep  abase- 
ment that  it  seemeth  to  him  reasonable  that  all  creatures  in 
heaven  and  earth  should  rise  up  against  him.  And  therefore 
he  will  not  and  dare  not  desire  any  consolation  and  release; 
but  he  is  willing  to  be  unconsoled  and  unreleased;  and  he  doth 
not  grieve  over  his  sufferings,  for  they  are  right  in  his  eyes,  and 
he  hath  nothing  to  say  against  them.  This  is  what  is  meant 
by  true  repentance  for  sin;  and  he  Vv'ho  in  this  present  tim'^. 
entereth  into  this  hell,  none  may  console  him.  Now  God  hath 
not  forsaken  a  man  in  this  hell,  but  He  is  laying  his  hand  upon 
him,  that  the  man  may  not  desire  nor  regard  anything  but  the 
eternal  Good  only.  And  then,  when  the  man  neither  careth 
for  nor  desireth  anything  but  the  eternal  Good  alone,  and  seek 

^  Book  v.,  ch.  ix.  (abridged). 


44       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

eth  not  himself  nor  his  own  things,  but  the  honour  of  God  only, 
he  is  made  a  partaker  of  all  manner  of  joy,  bliss,  peace,  rest, 
and  consolation,  and  so  the  man  is  henceforth  in  the  kingdom 
of  heaven.  This  hell  and  this  heaven  are  two  good  safe  ways  for 
1  man,  and  happy  is  he  who  truly  findeth  them."^ 

How  much  more  active  and  positive  the  impulse  of  the 
Christian  writer  to  accept  his  place  in  the  universe  is!  Mar- 
cus Aurelius  agrees  to  the  scheme — the  German  theologian 
agrees  with  it.  He  literally  abounds  in  agreement,  he  runs 
out  to  embrace  the  divine  decrees. 

Occasionally,  it  is  true,  the  stoic  rises  to  something  like 
a  Christian  warmth  of  sentiment,  as  in  the  often  quoted 
passage  of  Marcus  Aurelius: — 

"Everything  harmonizes  with  me  which  is  harmonious  to 
thee,  O  Universe.  Nothing  for  me  is  too  early  nor  too  late, 
which  is  in  due  time  for  thee.  Everything  is  fruit  to  me  which 
thy  seasons  bring,  O  Nature:  from  thee  are  all  things,  in  thee 
are  all  things,  to  thee  all  things  return.  The  poet  says,  Dear 
City  of  Cecrops;  and  wilt  thou  not  say.  Dear  City  of  Zeus?"- 

But  compare  even  as  devout  a  passage  as  this  with  a 
genuine  Christian  outpouring,  and  it  seems  a  little  cold. 
Turn,  for  instance,  to  the  Imitation  of  Christ: — 

"Lord,  thou  knowest  what  is  best;  let  this  or  that  be  accord 
ing  as  thou  wilt.  Give  what  thou  wilt,  so  much  as  thou  wilt, 
when  thou  wilt.  Do  with  me  as  thou  knowest  best,  and '  as 
shall  be  most  to  thine  honour.  Place  me  where  thou  wilt,  and 
freely  work  thy  will  with  me  in  all  things.  .  .  .  When  could  it 
be  evil  when  thou  wert  near?  I  had  rather  be  poor  for  thy  sake 
than  rich  without  thee.  I  choose  rather  to  be  a  pilgrim  upon 
the   earth    with    thee,   than    without    thee   to    possess    heaven. 

1  Chaps.  X.,  xi.  (abridged) :  Winkworth's  translation. 

2  Book  IV.,  §23. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF   THE   TOPIC  45 

Where  thou  art,  there  is  heaven;  and  where  thou  art  not,  be- 
hold there  death  and  hell."^ 

It  is  a  good  rule  in  physiology,  when  we  are  studying 
the  meaning  of  an  organ,  to  ask  after  its  most  peculiar  and 
characteristic  sort  of  performance,  and  to  seek  its  office  in 
that  one  of  its  functions  which  no  other  organ  can  possibly 
exert.  Surely  the  same  maxim  holds  good  in  our  present 
quest.  The  essence  of  religious  experiences,  the  thing  by 
which  we  finally  must  judge  them,  must  be  that  element 
or  quality  in  them  which  we  can  meet  nowhere  else.  And 
such  a  quality  will  be  of  course  most  prominent  and  easy 
to  notice  in  those  religious  experiences  which  are  most  one- 
sided, exaggerated,  and  intense. 

Now  when  we  compare  these  intenser  experiences  with 
the  experiences  of  tamer  minds,  so  cool  and  reasonable  that 
we  are  tempted  to  call  them  philosophical  rather  than  reli- 
gious, we  find  a  character  that  is  perfectly  distinct.  That 
character,  it  seems  to  me,  should  be  regarded  as  the  prac- 
tically important  differentia  of  religion  for  our  purpose;  and 
just  what  it  is  can  easily  be  brought  out  by  comparing  the 
mind  of  an  abstractly  conceived  Christian  with  that  of  a 
moralist  similarly  conceived. 

A  life  is  manly,  stoical,  moral,  or  philosophical,  we  say, 
in  proportion  as  it  is  less  swayed  by  paltry  personal  con- 
siderations and  more  by  objective  ends  that  call  for  energy, 
even  though  that  energy  bring  personal  loss  and  pain.  This 
is  the  good  side  of  war,  in  so  far  as  it  calls  for  "volunteers." 
And  for  morality  life  is  a  war,  and  the  service  of  the  high- 

^  Benham's  translation:  Book  III.,  chaps,  xv.,  lix.  Compare  Mary 
Moody  Emerson:  "Let  me  be  a  blot  on  this  fair  world,  the  obscurest, 
the  loneliest  sufferer,  with  one  proviso — that  I  know  it  is  His 
agency.  I  will  love  Him  though  He  shed  frost  and  darkness  on 
every  way  of  mine."  R.  W.  Emerson:  Lectures  and  Biographical 
Sketches,  p.  188. 


46       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

est  is  a  sort  of  cosmic  patriotism  which  also  calls  for  volun- 
teers. Even  a  sick  man,  unable  to  be  militant  outwardly, 
can  carry  on  the  moral  warfare.  He  can  willfully  turn  his 
attention  away  from  his  own  future,  whether  in  this  world 
or  the  next.  He  can  train  himself  to  indifference  to  his 
present  drawbacks  and  immerse  himself  in  whatever  ob- 
jective interests  still  remain  accessible.  He  can  follow  public 
news,  and  sympathize  with  other  people's  aflairs.  He  can 
cultivate  cheerful  manners,  and  be  silent  about  his  miseries. 
He  can  contemplate  whatever  ideal  aspects  of  existence  his 
philosophy  is  able  to  present  to  him,  and  practice  whatever 
duties,  such  as  patience,  resignation,  trust,  his  ethical  system 
requires.  Such  a  man  lives  on  his  loftiest,  largest  plane.  He 
is  a  high-hearted  freeman  and  no  pining  slave.  And  yet 
he  lacks  something  which  the  Christian  par  excellence,  the 
mystic  and  ascetic  saint,  for  example,  has  in  abundant 
measure,  and  which  makes  of  him  a  human  being  of  an 
altogether  different  denomination. 

The  Christian  also  .'ypurns  the  pinched  and  mumping 
sick-room  attitude,  and  the  lives  of  saints  are  full  of  a  kind 
of  callousness  to  diseased  conditions  of  body  which  prob- 
ably no  other  human  records  show.  But  whereas  the  merely 
moralistic  spurning  lakes  an  effort  of  volition,  the  Christian 
•spurning  is  the  result  of  the  excitement  of  a  higher  kind 
of  emotion,  in  the  oresence  of  which  no  exertion  of  volition 
is  required.  The  .noralist  must  hold  his  breath  and  keep 
his  muscles  ten;..;  and  so  long  as  this  athletic  attitude  is 
possible  all  gcci  well — morality  suffices.  But  the  athletic 
attitude  tends  ever  to  break  down,  and  it  inevitably  does 
break  down  even  in  the  most  stalwart  when  the  organism 
begins  to  decay,  or  when  morbid  fears  invade  the  mind.  To 
suggest  personal  will  and  effort  to  one  all  sicklied  o'er  with 
the  sense  of  irremediable  impotence  is  to  suggest  the  most 
impossible  of  things.  What  he  craves  is  to  be  consoled  in  his 
ver^f  vo^'clcssness,  to  feel  that  the  spirit  of  the  universe 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION   OF   THE   TOPIC  47 

recognizes  and  secures  him,  all  decaying  and  failing  as  he 
is.  Well,  we  are  all  such  helpless  failures  in  the  last  resort. 
The  sanest  and  best  of  us  are  of  one  clay  with  lunatics  and 
prison  inmates,  and  death  finally  runs  the  robustest  of  us 
down.  And  whenever  we  feel  this,  such  a  sense  of  the 
vanity  and  provisionality  of  our  voluntary  career  comes 
over  us  that  all  our  morality  appears  but  as  a  plaster  hiding 
a  sore  it  can  never  cure,  and  all  our  well-doing  as  the  hol- 
lowest  substitute  for  that  weW-being  that  our  lives  ought  to 
be  grounded  in,  but,  alas!  are  not. 

And  here  religion  comes  to  our  rescue  and  takes  our 
fate  into  her  hands.  There  is  a  state  of  mind,  known  to 
religious  men,  but  to  no  others,  in  which  the  will  to  assert 
ourselves  and  hold  our  own  has  been  displaced  by  a  willing- 
ness to  close  our  mouths  and  be  as  nothing  in  the  floods 
and  waterspouts  of  God.  In  this  state  of  mind,  what  we 
most  dreaded  has  become  the  habitation  of  our  safety,  and 
the  hour  of  our  moral  death  has  turned  into  our  spiritual 
birthday.  The  time  for  tension  in  our  soul  is  over,  and  that 
of  happy  relaxation,  of  calm  deep  breathing,  of  an  eternal 
present,  with  no  discordant  future  to  be  anxious  about,  has 
arrived.  Fear  is  not  held  in  abeyance  as  it  is  by  mere  moral- 
ity, it  is  positively  expunged  and  washed  away. 

We  shall  see  abundant  examples  of  this  happy  state  ol 
mind  in  later  lectures  of  this  course.  We  shall  see  how  in- 
finitely passionate  a  thing  religion  at  its  highest  flights  can 
be.  Like  love,  like  wrath,  like  hope,  ambition,  jealousy,  like 
every  other  instinctive  eagerness  and  impulse,  it  adds  to  life 
an  enchantment  which  is  not  rationally  or  logically  deduc- 
ible  from  anything  else.  This  enchantment,  coming  as  a 
gift  when  it  does  come — a  gift  of  our  organism,  the  physiol- 
ogists will  tell  us,  a  gift  of  God's  grace,  the  theologians  say 
— is  either  there  or  not  there  for  us,  and  there  are  persons 
who  can  no  more  become  possessed  by  k  than  they  can  fall 
in  love  with  a  given  woman  by  mere  word  of  command 


48       THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Religious  feeling  is  thus  an  absolute  addition  to  the  Sub- 
ject's range  of  life.  It  gives  him  a  new  sphere  of  power. 
When  the  outward  battle  is  lost,  and  the  outer  world  dis- 
owns him,  it  redeems  and  vivifies  an  interior  world  which 
otherwise  would  be  an  empty  waste. 

If  religion  is  to  mean  anything  definite  for  us,  it  seems 
to  me  that  we  ought  to  take  it  as  meaning  this  added  dimen- 
sion of  emotion,  this  enthusiastic  temper  of  espousal,  in 
regions  where  morality  strictly  so  called  can  at  best  but 
bow  its  head  and  acquiesce.  It  ought  to  mean  nothing  short 
of  this  new  reach  of  freedom  for  us,  with  the  struggle  over, 
the  keynote  of  the  universe  sounding  in  our  ears,  and  ever- 
lasting possession  spread  before  our  eyes.^ 

This  sort  of  happiness  in  the  absolute  and  everlasting 
is  what  we  find  nowhere  but  in  religion.  It  is  parted  off 
from  all  mere  animal  happiness,  all  mere  enjoyment  of  the 
present,  by  that  element  of  solemnity  of  which  I  have  al- 
ready made  so  much  account.  Solemnity  is  a  hard  thing  to 
define  abstractly,  but  certain  of  its  marks  are  patent  enough. 
A  solemn  state  of  mind  is  never  crude  or  simple — it  seems 
to  contain  a  certain  measure  of  its  own  opposite  in  solution. 
A  solemn  joy  preserves  a  sort  of  bitter  in  its  sweetness;  a 
solemn  sorrow  is  one  to  which  we  intimately  consent.  But 
there  are  writers  who,  realizing  that  happiness  of  a  supreme 
sort  is  the  prerogative  of  religion,  forget  this  complication, 
and  call  all  happiness,  as  such,  religious.  Mr.  Havelock 
Ellis,  for  example,  identifies  religion  with  the  entire  field  of 
the  soul's  liberation  from  oppressive  moods. 

^  Once  more,  there  are  plenty  of  men,  constitutionally  sombre 
men,  in  whose  religious  life  this  rapturousness  is  lacking.  They  are 
religious  in  the  wider  sense;  yet  in  this  acutest  of  all  senses  they  are 
not  so,  and  it  is  religion  in  the  acutest  sense  that  I  wish,  without 
disputing  about  words,  to  study  first,  so  as  to  get  at  its  typical 
differentia. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF   THE   TOPIC  49 

"The  simplest  functions  of  physiological  life,"  he  writes 
"may  be  its  ministers.  Every  one  who  is  at  all  acquainted  with 
the  Persian  mystics  knows  how  wine  may  be  regarded  as  an 
instrument  of  religion.  Indeed,  in  all  countries  and  in  all  ages, 
some  form  of  physical  enlargement — singing,  dancing,  drink- 
ing, sexual  excitement — has  been  intimately  associated  with 
worship.  Even  the  momentary  expansion  of  the  soul  in  laugh- 
ter is,  to  however  slight  an  extent,  a  religious  exercise.  .  .  . 
Whenever  an  impulse  from  the  world  strikes  against  the  or- 
ganism, and  the  resultant  is  not  discomfort  or  pain,  not  even 
the  muscular  contraction  of  strenuous  manhood,  but  a  joyous 
expansion  or  aspiration  of  the  whole  soul — there  is  religion. 
It  is  the  infinite  for  which  we  hunger,  and  we  ride  gladly  on 
every  little  wave  that  promises  to  bear  us  towards  it."^ 

But  such  a  straight  identification  of  religion  with  any 
and  every  form  of  happiness  leaves  the  essential  peculiarity 
of  religious  happiness  out.  The  more  commonplace  hap- 
pinesses which  we  get  are  "reliefs,"  occasioned  by  our 
momentary  escapes  from  evils  either  experienced  or  threat- 
ened. But  in  its  most  characteristic  embodiments,  religious 
happiness  is  no  mere  feeling  of  escape.  It  cares  no  longer 
to  escape.  Tt  consents  to  the  evil  outwardly  as  a  form  of 
sacrifice — inwardly  it  knows  it  to  be  permanently  overcome. 
If  you  ask  how  religion  thus  falls  on  the  thorns  and  faces 
death,  and  in  the  very  act  annuls  annihilation,  I  cannot  ex^ 
plain  the  matter,  for  it  is  religion's  secret,  and  to  understand 
it  you  must  yourself  have  been  a  religious  man  of  the  ex- 
tremer  type.  In  our  future  examples,  even  of  the  simplest 
and  healthiest-minded  type  of  religious  consciousness,  we 
shall  find  this  complex  sacrificial  constitution,  in  which  a 
higher*  happiness  holds  a  lower  unhappiness  in  check.  In 
the  Louvre  there  is  a  picture,  by  Guido  Reni,  of  St.  Michael 
with  his  foot  on  Satan's  neck.  The  richness  of  the  picture 

^  The  New  Spirit,  p.  232. 


50       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

is  in  large  part  due  to  the  fiend's  figure  being  there.  The 
richness  of  its  allegorical  meaning  also  is  due  to  his  being 
there — that  is,  the  world  is  all  the  richer  for  having  a  devil 
in  it,  so  long  as  we  \eep  our  joot  upon  his  nec\.  In  the 
religious  consciousness,  that  is  just  the  position  in  which 
the  fiend,  the  negative  or  tragic  principle,  is  found;  and 
for  that  very  reason  the  religious  consciousness  is  so  rich 
from  the  emotional  point  of  view.^  We  shall  see  how  in 
certain  men  and  women  it  takes  on  a  monstrously  ascetic 
form.  There  are  saints  who  have  literally  fed  on  the  nega- 
tive principle,  on  humiliation  and  privation,  and  the  thought 
of  suffering  and  death — their  souls  growing  in  happiness 
just  in  proportion  as  their  outward  state  grew  more  intol- 
erable. No  other  emotion  than  religious  emotion  can  bring 
a  man  to  this  peculiar  pass.  And  it  is  for  that  reason  that 
when  we  ask  our  question  about  the  value  of  religion  for 
human  life,  I  think  we  ought  to  look  for  the  answer  among 
these  violenter  examples  rather  than  among  those  of  a  more 
moderate  hue. 

Having  the  phenomenon  of  our  study  in  its  acutest  pos- 
sible form  to  start  with,  we  can  shade  down  as  much  as  we 
please  later.  And  if  in  these  cases,  repulsive  as  they  are  to 
our  ordinary  worldly  way  of  judging,  we  find  ourselves 
compelled  to  acknowledge  religion's  value  and  treat  it  with 
respect,  it  will  have  proved  in  some  way  its  value  for  life 
at  large.  By  subtracting  and  toning  down  extravagances 
we  may  thereupon  proceed  to  trace  the  boundaries  of  its 
legitimate  sway. 

To  be  sure,  it  makes  our  task  difficult  to  have  to  deal 
so  much  with  eccentricities  and  extremes.  "How  can  reli- 
gion on  the  whole  be  the  most  important  of  all  human  func- 
tions," you  may  ask,  "if  every  several  manifestation  of  it 

^  I  owe  this  allegorical  illustration  to  my  lamented  colleague  and 
i  iend,  Charles  Carroll  Everett. 


CIRCUMSCRIPTION    OF    THE   TOPIC  5I 

in  turn  have  to  be  corrected  and  sobered  down  and  pruned 
away?"  Such  a  thesis  seems  a  paradox  impossible  to  sustain 
reasonably — yet  I  believe  that  something  like  it  will  have 
to  be  our  final  contention.  That  personal  attitude  which  the 
individual  finds  himself  impelled  to  take  up  towards  what 
he  apprehends  to  be  the  divine — and  you  will  remember 
that  this  was  our  definition — will  prove  to  be  both  a  helpless 
and  a  sacrificial  attitude.  That  is,  we  shall  have  to  confess 
to  at  least  some  amount  of  dependence  on  sheer  mercy,  and 
to  practice  some  amount  of  renunciation,  great  or  small, 
to  save  our  souls  alive.  The  constitution  of  the  world  we  live 
in  requires  it: — 

"Entbehren  soUst  du!  sollst  entbehren! 
Das  ist  der  ewige  Gesang 
Der  jedem  an  die  Ohren  klingt, 
Den,  unser  ganzes  Leben  lang 
Uns  heiser  jede  Stunde  singt." 

For  when  all  is  said  and  done,  we  are  in  the  end  abso- 
lutely dependent  on  the  universe;  and  into  sacrifices  and 
surrenders  of  some  sort,  deliberately  looked  at  and  accepted, 
we  are  drawn  and  pressed  as  into  our  only  permanent 
positions  of  repose.  Now  in  those  states  of  mind  which  fall 
short  of  religion,  the  surrender  is  submitted  to  as  an  im- 
position of  necessity,  and  the  sacrifice  is  undergone  at  the 
very  best  without  complaint.  In  the  religious  life,  on  the 
contrary,  surrender  and  sacrifice  are  positively  espoused: 
even  unnecessary  givings-up  are  added  in  order  that  the 
happiness  may  increase.  Religion  thus  ma\es  easy  and  felic- 
itous what  in  any  case  is  necessary;  and  if  it  be  the  only 
agency  that  can  accomplish  this  result,  its  vital  importance 
as  a  human  faculty  stands  vindicated  beyond  dispute.  It  be- 
comes an  essential  organ  of  our  life,  performing  a  function 
which  no  other  portion  of  our  nature  can  so  successfully 
fulfill.  From  the  merely  biological  point  of  view,  so  to  call 


52       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

it,  this  is  a  conclusion  to  which,  so  far  as  I  can  now  see, 
we  shall  inevitably  be  led,  and  led  moreover  by  following 
the  purely  empirical  method  of  demonstration  which  I 
sketched  to  you  in  the  first  lecture.  Of  the  farther  office  of 
religion  as  a  metaphysical  revelation  I  will  say  nothing  now. 
But  to  foreshadow  the  terminus  of  one's  investigations 
is  one  thing,  and  to  arrive  there  safely  is  another.  In  the  next 
lecture,  abandoning  the  extreme  generalities  which  have 
engrossed  us  hitherto,  I  propose  that  we  begin  our  actual 
journey  by  addressing  ourselves  directly  to  the  concrete 
facts. 


Lecture  III 

THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN 

WERE  one  asked  to  characterize  the  H£e  of  religion 
in  the  broadest  and  most  general  terms  possible, 
one  might  say  that  it  consists  of  the  belief  that  there  is  an 
unseen  order,  and  that  our  supreme  good  lies  in  harmo- 
niously adjusting  ourselves  thereto.  This  belief  and  this  ad- 
justment are  the  religious  attitude  in  the  soul.  I  wish  dur- 
ing this  hour  to  call  your  attention  to  some  of  the  psycho- 
logical peculiarities  of  such  an  attitude  as  this,  or  belief  in 
an  object  which  we  cannot  see.  All  our  attitudes,  moral, 
practical,  or  emotional,  as  well  as  religious,  are  due  to  the 
"objects"  of  our  consciousness,  the  things  which  we  believe 
to  exist,  whether  really  or  ideally,  along  with  ourselves. 
Such  objects  may  be  present  to  our  senses,  or  they  may  be 
present  only  to  our  thought.  In  either  case  they  elicit  frorr- 
us  a  reaction;  and  the  reaction  due  to  things  of  thought  is 
notoriously  in  many  cases  as  strong  as  that  due  to  sensible 
presences.  It  may  be  even  stronger.  The  memory  of  an  in- 
sult may  make  us  angrier  than  the  insult  did  when  we  re- 
ceived it.  We  are  frequently  more  ashamed  of  our  blunders 
afterwards  than  we  were  at  the  moment  of  making  them; 
and  in  general  our  whole  higher  prudential  and  moral  life 
is  based  on  the  fact  that  material  sensations  actually  present 
may  have  a  weaker  influence  on  our  action  than  ideas  of 
remoter  facts. 

The  more  concrete  objects  of  most  men's  religion,  the 
deities  whom  they  worship,  are  known  to  them  only  in 
idea.   It   has  been   vouchsafed,   for  example,   to   very   few 

53 


54       THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Christian  believers  to  have  had  a  sensible  vision  of  their 
Saviour;  though  enough  appearances  of  this  sort  are  on 
record,  by  way  of  miraculous  exception,  to  merit  our  at- 
tention later.  The  whole  force  of  the  Christian  religion, 
therefore,  so  far  as  belief  in  the  divine  personages  determines 
the  prevalent  attitude  of  the  believer,  is  in  general  exerted 
by  the  instrumentality  of  pure  ideas,  of  which  nothing  in 
the  individual's  past  experience  directly  serves  as  a  model. 

But  in  addition  to  these  ideas  of  the  more  concrete  reli- 
gious objects,  religion  is  full  of  abstract  objects  which  prove 
to  have  an  equal  power.  God's  attributes  as  such,  his  holi- 
ness, his  justice,  his  mercy,  his  absoluteness,  his  infinity, 
his  omniscience,  his  tri-unity,  the  various  mysteries  of  the 
redemptive  process,  the  operation  of  the  sacraments,  etc., 
have  proved  fertile  wells  of  inspiring  meditation  for  Chris- 
tian believers.^  We  shall  see  later  that  the  absence  of  definite 
sensible  images  is  positively  insisted  on  by  the  mystical 
authorities  in  all  religions  as  the  sine  qua  non  of  a  success- 
ful orison,  or  contemplation  of  the  higher  divine  truths. 
Such  contemplations  are  expected  (and  abundantly  verify  the 
expectation,  as  we  shall  also  see)  to  influence  the  believer's 
subsequent  attitude  very  powerfully  for  good. 

Immanuel  Kant  held  a  curious  doctrine  about  such  ob- 
jects of  belief  as  God,  the  design  of  creation,  the  soul,  its 
freedom,  and  the  life  hereafter.  These  things,  he  said,  are 
properly  not  objects  of  knowledge  at  all.  Our  conceptions 
always  require  a  sense-content  to  work  with,  and  as  the 

^  Example:  "I  have  had  much  comfort  lately  in  meditating  on  the 
passages  which  show  the  personality  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  his 
distinctness  from  the  Father  and  the  Son.  It  is  a  subject  that  requires 
searching  into  to  find  out,  but,  when  realized,  gives  one  so  much 
more  true  and  lively  a  sense  of  the  fullness  of  the  Godhead,  and  its 
work  in  us  and  to  us,  than  when  only  thinking  of  the  Spirit  in  its 
effect  on  us."  Augustus  Hare:  Memorials,  i.  244,  Maria  Hare  to 
Lucy  H.  Hare. 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN  55 

words  'soul,"  "God,"  "immortality,"  cover  no  distinctive 
sense-content  whatever,  it  follows  that  theoretically  speak- 
ing they  are  words  devoid  of  any  significance.  Yet  strangely 
enough  they  have  a  definite  meaning  for  our  practice.  We 
can  act  as  if  there  were  a  God ;  feel  as  if  we  were  free ;  con- 
sider Nature  as  if  she  were  full  of  special  designs;  lay  plans 
as  if  we  were  to  be  immortal;  and  we  find  then  that  these 
words  do  make  a  genuine  difference  in  our  moral  life.  Our 
faith  that  these  unintelligible  objects  actually  exist  proves 
thus  to  be  a  full  equivalent  in  pra^tischer  Hinsicht,  as  Kant 
calls  it,  or  from  the  point  of  view  of  our  action,  for  a  knowl- 
edge of  what  they  might  be,  in  case  we  were  permitted  pos- 
itively to  conceive  them.  So  we  have  the  strange  phenom- 
enon, as  Kant  assures  us,  of  a  mind  believing  with  all  its 
strength  in  the  real  presence  of  a  set  of  things  of  no  one  of 
which  it  can  form  any  notion  whatsoever. 

My  object  in  thus  recalling  Kant's  doctrine  to  your  mind 
is  not  to  express  any  opinion  as  to  the  accuracy  of  this  particu- 
larly uncouth  part  of  his  philosophy,  but  only  to  illustrate 
the  characteristic  of  human  nature  which  we  are  consider- 
ing, by  an  example  so  classical  in  its  exaggeration.  The 
sentiment  of  reality  can  indeed  attach  itself  so  strongly  to 
our  object  of  belief  that  our  whole  life  is  polarized  through 
and  through,  so  to  speak,  by  its  sense  of  the  existence  of  the 
thing  believed  in,  and  yet  that  thing,  for  purpose  of  definite 
description,  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  present  to  our  mind 
at  all.  It  is  as  if  a  bar  of  iron,  without  touch  or  sight,  with 
no  representative  faculty  whatever,  might  nevertheless  be 
strongly  endowed  with  an  inner  capacity  for  magnetic  feel- 
ing; and  as  if,  through  the  various  arousals  of  its  magnetism 
by  magnets  coming  and  going  in  its  neighborhood,  it  might 
be  consciously  determined  to  different  attitudes  and  tenden- 
cies. Such  a  bar  of  iron  could  never  give  you  an  outward  de^ 
scription  of  the  agencies  that  had  the  power  of  stirring  it  so 
strongly;  yet  of  their  presence,  and  of  their  significance 


56       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

for  its  life,  it  would  be  intensely  aware  through  every  fibre 
of  its  being. 

It  is  not  only  the  Ideas  of  pure  Reason  as  Kant  styled 
them,  that  have  this  power  of  making  us  vitally  feel  pres- 
ences that  we  are  impotent  articulately  to  describe.  All  sorts 
of  higher  abstractions  bring  with  them  the  same  kind  of 
impalpable  appeal.  Remember  those  passages  from  Emer- 
son which  I  read  at  my  last  lecture.  The  whole  universe  of 
concrete  objects,  as  we  know  them,  swims,  not  only  for 
such  a  transcendentalist  writer,  but  for  all  of  lis,  in  a  wider 
and  higher  universe  of  abstract  ideas,  that  lend  it  its  sig- 
nificance. As  time,  space,  and  the  ether  soak  through  all 
things  so  (we  feel)  do  abstract  and  essential  goodness, 
beauty,  strength,  significance,  justice,  soak  through  all 
things  good,  strong,  significant,  and  just. 

Such  ideas,  and  others  equally  abstract,  form  the  back- 
ground for  all  our  facts,  the  fountain-head  of  all  the  pos- 
sibilities we  conceive  of.  They  give  its  "nature,"  as  we  call 
it,  to  every  special  thing.  Everything  we  know  is  "what"  it 
is  by  sharing  in  the  nature  of  one  of  these  abstractions.  We 
can  never  look  directly  at  them,  for  they  are  bodiless  and 
featureless  and  footless,  but  we  grasp  all  other  things  by  their 
means,  and  in  handling  the  real  world  we  should  be  stricken 
with  helplessness  in  just  so  far  forth  as  we  might  lose  these 
mental  objects,  these  adjectives  and  adverbs  and  predicates 
and  heads  of  classification  and  conception. 

This  absolute  determinability  of  our  mind  by  abstrac- 
tions is  one  of  the  cardinal  facts  in  our  human  constitution. 
Polarizing  and  magnetizing  us  as  they  do,  we  turn  towards 
them  and  from  them,  we  seek  them,  hold  them,  hate  them, 
bless  them,  just  as  if  they  were  so  many  concrete  beings. 
And  beings  they  are,  beings  as  real  in  the  realm  which  they 
inhabit  as  the  changing  things  of  sense  are  in  the  realm  of 
space. 

Plato  gave  so  brilliant  and  impressive  a  defense  of  this 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN  57 

common  human  feeling,  that  the  doctrine  of  the  reaUty 
of  abstract  objects  has  been  known  as  the  platonic  theory 
of  ideas  ever  since.  Abstract  Beauty,  for  example,  is  for 
Plato  a  perfectly  definite  individual  being,  of  which  the 
intellect  is  aware  as  of  something  additional  to  all  the  per- 
ishing beauties  of  the  earth.  "The  true  order  of  going,"  he 
says,  in  the  often  quoted  passage  in  his  "Banquet,"  "is  to 
use  the  beauties  of  earth  as  steps  along  which  one  mounts 
upwards  for  the  sake  of  that  other  Beauty,  going  from  one 
to  two,  and  from  two  to  all  fair  forms,  and  from  fair  forms 
to  fair  actions,  and  from  fair  actions  to  fair  notions,  until 
from  fair  notions,  he  arrives  at  the  notion  of  absolute 
Beauty,  and  at  last  knows  what  the  essence  of  Beauty  is."  ^ 
In  our  last  lecture  we  had  a  glimpse  of  the  way  in  which 
a  platonizing  writer  like  Emerson  may  treat  the  abstract 
divineness  of  things,  the  moral  structure  of  the  universe,  as 
a  fact  worthy  of  worship.  In  those  various  churches  without 
a  God  which  to-day  are  spreading  through  the  world  under 
the  name  of  ethical  societies,  we  have  a  similar  worship  of 
the  abstract  divine,  the  moral  law  believed  in  as  an  ulti- 
mate object.  "Science"  in  many  minds  is  genuinely  taking 
the  place  of  a  religion.  Where  this  is  so,  the  scientist  treats 
the  "Laws  of  Nature"  as  objective  facts  to  be  revered.  A 
brilliant  school  of  interpretation  of  Greek  mythology  would 
have  it  that  in  their  origin  the  Greek  gods  were  only  half- 
metaphoric  personifications  of  those  great  spheres  of  abstract 
law  and  order  into  which  the  natural  world  falls  apart — 
the  sky-sphere,  the  ocean-sphere,  the  earth-sphere,  and  the 
like;  just  as  even  now  we  may  speak  of  the  smile  of  the 
morning,  the  kiss  of  the  breeze,  or  the  bite  of  the  cold,  with- 
out really  meaning  that  these  phenomena  of  nature  actually 
wear  a  human  face.^ 

^  Symposium,  Jowett,  1871,  i.  527. 

^Example:    "Nature    is    always    so    interesting,    under    whatever 
aspect  she  shows  herself,  that  when  it  rains,  I  seem  to  see  a  beauti- 


58       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

As  regards  the  origin  of  the  Greek  gods,  we  need  not 
at  present  seek  an  opinion.  But  the  whole  array  of  our 
instances  leads  to  a  conckision  something  kke  this:  It  is 
as  if  there  were  in  the  human  consciousness  a  sense  of  real- 
ity, a  feeling  of  objective  presence,  a  perception  of  what  we 
may  call  "something  there,"  more  deep  and  more  general 
than  any  of  the  special  and  particular  "senses"  by  which 
the  current  psychology  supposes  existent  realities  to  be  orig- 
inally revealed.  If  this  were  so,  we  might  suppose  the  senses 
to  waken  our  attitudes  and  conduct  as  they  so  habitually 
do,  by  first  exciting  this  sense  of  reality;  but  anything  else, 
any  idea,  for  example,  that  might  similarly  excite  it,  would 
have  that  same  prerogative  of  appearing  real  which  objects 
of  sense  normally  possess.  So  far  as  religious  conceptions 
were  able  to  touch  this  reality-feeling,  they  would  be  be- 
lieved in  in  spite  of  criticism,  even  though  they  might 
be  so  vague  and  remote  as  to  be  almost  unimaginable,  even 
though  they  might  be  such  non-entities  in  point  of  whatness, 
as  Kant  makes  the  objects  of  his  moral  theology  to  be. 

The  most  curious  proofs  of  the  existence  of  such  an  un- 
differentiated sense  of  reality  as  this  are  found  in  expe- 
riences of  hallucination.  It  often  happens  that  an  halluci- 
nation is  imperfectly  developed :  the  person  affected  will  feel 
a  "presence"  in  the  room,  definitely  localized,  facing  in  one 
particular  way,  real  in  the  most  emphatic  sense  of  the 
word,  often  coming  suddenly,  and  as  suddenly  gone;  and 
yet  neither  seen,  heard,  touched,  nor  cognized  in  any  of 
the  usual  "sensible"  ways.  Let  me  give  you  an  example  of 
this,  before  I  pass  to  the  objects  with  whose  presence  reli- 
gion is  more  peculiarly  concerned. 

An  intimate  friend  of  mine,  one  of  the  keenest  intellects 
I  know,  has  had  several  experiences  of  this  sort.  He  writes 
as  follows  in  response  to  my  inquiries: — 

ful   woman   weeping.   She   appears   the   more   beautiful,    the   more 
afflicted  she  is."  B.  de  Sl  Pierre. 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE    UNSEEN  59 

"I  have  several  times  within  the  past  few  years  felt  the  so- 
called  'consciousness  of  a  presence.'  The  experiences  which  I 
have  in  mind  are  clearly  distinguishable  from  another  kind  of 
experience  which  I  have  had  very  frequently,  and  which  I  fancy 
many  persons  would  also  call  the  'consciousness  of  a  presence.' 
But  the  difference  for  me  between  the  two  sets  of  experience 
is  as  great  as  the  difference  between  feeling  a  slight  warmth 
originating  I  know  not  vv'here,  and  standing  in  the  midst  of  a 
conflagration  with  all  the  ordinary  senses  alert. 

"It  was  about  September,  1884,  when  I  had  the  first  experi- 
ence. On  the  previous  night  I  had  had,  after  getting  into  bed 
at  my  rooms  in  College,  a  vivid  tactile  hallucination  of  being 
grasped  by  the  arm,  which  made  me  get  up  and  search  the 
room  for  an  intruder;  but  the  sense  of  presence  properly  so 
called  came  on  the  next  night.  After  I  had  got  into  bed  and 
blown  out  the  candle,  I  lay  awake  awhile  thinking  on  the  pre- 
vious night's  experience,  when  suddenly  I  jelt  something  come 
into  the  room  and  stay  close  to  my  bed.  It  remained  only  a 
minute  or  two.  I  did  not  recognize  it  by  any  ordinary  sense, 
and  yet  there  was  a  horribly  unpleasant  'sensation'  connected 
with  it.  It  stirred  something  more  at  the  roots  of  my  being 
than  any  ordinary  perception.  The  feeling  had  something  of 
the  quality  of  a  very  large  tearing  vital  pain  spreading  chiefly 
over  the  chest,  but  within  the  organism — and  yet  the  feeling 
was  not  pain  so  much  as  abhorrence.  At  all  events,  something 
was  present  with  me,  and  I  knew  its  presence  far  more  surely 
than  I  have  ever  known  the  presence  of  any  fleshly  living 
creature.  I  was  conscious  of  its  departure  as  of  its  coming:  an 
almost  instantaneously  swift  going  through  the  door,  and  the 
'horrible  sensation'  disappeared. 

"On  the  third  night  when  I  retired  my  mind  was  absorbed 
in  some  lectures  which  I  was  preparing,  and  I  was  still  ab- 
sorbed in  these  when  I  became  aware  of  the  actual  presence 
(though  not  of  the  coming)  of  the  thing  that  was  there  the 
night  before,  and  of  the  'horrible  sensation.'  I  then  mentally 
concentrated  all  my  effort  to  charge  this  'thing,'  if  it  was  evil. 
to  depart,  if  it  was  not  evil,  to  tell  me  who  or  what  it  was,  and 
if  it  could  not  explain  itself,  to  go,  and  that  I  would  compel  it 


60       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

to  go.  It  went  as  on  the  previous  night,  and  my  body  quickly 
recovered  its  normal  state. 

"On  two  other  occasions  in  my  life  I  have  had  precisely  the 
same  'horrible  sensation.'  Once  it  lasted  a  full  quarter  of  an 
hour.  In  all  three  instances  the  certainty  that  there  in  outward 
space  there  stood  something  was  indescribably  stronger  than 
the  ordinary  certainty  of  companionship  when  we  are  in  the 
close  presence  of  ordinary  living  people.  The  something  seemed 
close  to  me,  and  intensely  more  real  than  any  ordinary  percep- 
tion. Although  I  felt  it  to  be  like  unto  myself,  so  to  speak,  or 
finite,  small,  and  distressful,  as  it  were,  I  didn't  recognize  it 
as  any  individual  being  or  person." 

Of  course  such  an  experience  as  this  does  not  connect 
itself  with  the  religious  sphere.  Yet  it  may  upon  occasion 
do  so;  and  the  same  correspondent  informs  me  that  at 
more  than  one  other  conjuncture  he  had  the  sense  of  presence 
developed  with  equal  intensity  and  abruptness,  only  then 
it  was  filled  with  a  quality  of  joy. 

"There  was  not  a  mere  consciousness  of  something  there, 
but  fused  in  the  central  happiness  of  it,  a  startling  awareness  of 
some  ineffable  good.  Not  vague  either,  not  like  the  emotional 
effect  of  some  poem,  or  scene,  or  blossom,  of  music,  but  the  sure 
knowledge  of  the  close  presence  of  a  sort  of  mighty  person,  and 
after  it  went,  the  memory  persisted  as  the  one  perception  of 
reality.  Everything  else  might  be  a  dream,  but  not  that." 

My  friend,  as  it  oddly  happens,  does  not  interpret  these 
latter  experiences  theistically,  as  signifying  the  presence  of 
God.  But  it  would  clearly  not  have  been  unnatural  to  inter- 
pret them  as  a  revelation  of  the  deity's  existence.  When  we 
reach  the  subject  of  mysticism,  we  shall  have  much  more  to 
say  upon  this  head. 

Lest  the  oddity  of  these  phenomena  should  disconcert  you, 
I  will  venture  to  read  you  a  couple  of  similar  narratives, 
much  shorter,  merely  to  show  that  we  are  dealing  with  a 
well-marked  natural  kind  of  fact.  In  the  first  case,  which  I 


.     THE  REALITY  OF  THE   UNSEEN  6^ 

take  from  the  Journal  of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research, 
the  sense  of  presence  developed  in  a  few  moments  into  a  dis- 
tinctly visualized  hallucination — but  I  leave  that  part  of  the 
story  out. 

"I  had  read,"  the  narrator  says,  "some  twenty  minutes  or 
so,  was  thoroughly  absorbed  in  the  book,  my  mind  was  per- 
fectly quiet,  and  for  the  time  being  my  friends  were  quite  for- 
gotten, when  suddenly  without  a  moment's  warning  my  whole 
being  seemed  roused  to  the  highest  state  of  tension  or  alive- 
ness,  and  I  was  aware,  with  an  intenseness  not  easily  imagined 
by  those  who  had  never  experienced  it,  that  another  being  or 
presence  was  not  only  in  the  room,  but  quite  close  to  me.  I  put 
my  book  down,  and  although  my  excitement  was  great,  I  felt 
quite  collected,  and  not  conscious  of  any  sense  of  fear.  Without 
changing  my  position,  and  looking  straight  at  the  fire,  I  knew 
somehow  that  my  friend  A.  H.  was  standing  at  my  left  elbow, 
but  so  far  behind  me  as  to  be  hidden  by  the  armchair  in  which 
I  was  leaning  back.  Moving  my  eyes  round  slightly  without 
otherwise  changing  my  position,  the  lower  portion  of  one  leg 
became  visible,  and  I  instantly  recognized  the  gray-blue  ma- 
terial of  trousers  he  often  wore,  but  the  stuff  appeared  semi- 
transparent,  reminding  me  of  tobacco  smoke  in  consistency,"-^ — 
and  hereupon  the  visual  hallucination  came. 

Another  informant  writes: — 

"Quite  early  in  the  night  I  was  awakened.  ...  I  felt  as  if 
I  had  been  aroused  intentionally,  and  at  first  thought  some  one 
was  breaking  into  the  house.  ...  I  then  turned  on  my  side  to 
go  to  sleep  again,  and  immediately  felt  a  consciousness  of  a 
presence  in  the  room,  and  singular  to  state,  it  was  not  the  con- 
sciousness of  a  live  person,  but  of  a  spiritual  presence.  This 
may  provoke  a  smile,  but  I  can  only  tell  you  the  facts  as  they 
occurred  to  me.  I  do  not  know  how  to  better  describe  my  sen- 
sations than  by  simply  stating  that  I  felt  a  consciousness  of 
a  spiritual  presence.  ...     I  felt  also  at  the  same  time  a  strong 

^Journal  of  the  S.  P.  R.,  February,  1895,  p.  26. 


^)2       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

feeling  of  superstitious  dread,  as  if  something  strange  and  fear- 
ful were  about  to  happen."^ 

Professor  Flournoy  of  Geneva  gives  me  the  following  tes- 
timony of  a  friend  of  his,  a  lady,  who  has  the  gift  of  auto- 
matic or  involuntary  writing: — 

"Whenever  I  practice  automatic  writing,  what  makes  me  feel 
that  it  is  not  due  to  a  subconscious  self  is  the  feeling  I  always 
have  of  a  foreign  presence,  external  to  my  body.  It  is  some- 
times so  definitely  characterized  that  I  could  point  to  its  exact 
position.  This  impression  of  presence  is  impossible  to  describe. 
It  varies  in  intensity  and  clearness  according  to  the  personality 
from  whom  the  writing  professes  to  come.  If  it  is  some  one 
whom  I  love,  I  feel  it  immediately,  before  any  writing  has  come. 
My  heart  seems  to  recognize  it." 

In  an  earlier  book  of  mine  I  have  cited  at  full  length  a 
curious  case  of  presence  felt  by  a  blind  man.  The  presence 
was  that  of  the  figure  of  a  gray-bearded  man  dressed  in  a 
})epper  and  salt  suit,  squeezing  himself  under  the  crack  of 
the  door  and  moving  across  the  floor  of  the  room  towards  a 
sofa.  The  blind  subject  of  this  quasi-hallucination  is  an  ex- 
ceptionally intelligent  reporter.  He  is  entirely  without  inter- 
nal visual  imagery  and  cannot  represent  light  or  colors  to 
himself,  and  is  positive  that  his  other  senses,  hearing,  etc., 
were  not  involved  in  this  false  perception.  It  seems  to  have 
been  an  abstract  conception  rather,  with  the  feelings  of  real- 
ity and  spatial  outwardness  directly  attached  to  it — in  other 
words,  a  fully  objectified  and  exteriorized  idea. 

Such  cases,  taken  along  with  others  which  would  be  too 
tedious  for  quotation,  seem  sufficiently  to  prove  the  existence 
in  our  mental  machinery  of  a  sense  of  present  reality  more 
diffused  and  general  than  that  which  our  special  senses 
yield.  For  the  pyschologists  the  tracing  of  the  organic  seat  of 

^  E.  Gurney:  Phantasms  of  the  Living,  i.  384. 


THE  REALITY  OF  THE  UNSEEN  63 

such  a  feeling  would  form  a  pretty  problem — nothing  could 
be  more  natural  than  to  connect  it  with  the  muscular  sense, 
with  the  feeling  that  our  muscles  were  innervating  them- 
selves for  action.  Whatsoever  thus  innervated  our  activity, 
or  "made  our  flesh  creep" — our  senses  are  what  do  so  often- 
est — might  then  appear  real  and  present,  even  though  it 
were  but  an  abstract  idea.  But  with  such  vague  conjectures 
we  have  no  concern  at  present,  for  our  interest  lies  with  the 
faculty  rather  than  with  its  organic  seat. 

Like  ail  positive  affections  of  consciousness,  the  sense  of 
reality  has  its  negative  counterpart  in  the  shape  of  a  feeling 
of  unreality  by  which  persons  may  be  haunted,  and  of  which 
one  sometimes  hears  complaint: — 

"When  I  reflect  on  the  fact  that  I  have  made  my  appear- 
ance by  accident  upon  a  globe  itself  whirled  through  space  as 
the  sport  of  the  catastrophes  of  the  heavens,"  says  Madame 
Ackermann;  "when  I  see  myself  surrounded  by  beings  a? 
ephemeral  and  incomprehensible  as  I  am  myself,  and  all  excit- 
edly pursuing  pure  chimeras,  I  experience  a  strange  feeling  of 
being  in  a  dream.  It  seems  to  me  as  if  I  have  loved  and  suffered 
and  that  erelong  I  shall  die,  in  a  dream.  My  last  word  will  be, 
'I  have  been  dreaming.'  "^ 

In  another  lecture  we  shall  see  how  in  morbid  melancholy 
this  sense  of  the  unreality  of  things  may  become  a  carking 
pain,  and  even  lead  to  suicide. 

We  may  now  lay  it  down  as  certain  that  in  the  distinctive- 
ly religious  sphere  of  experience,  many  persons  (how  many 
we  cannot  tell)  possess  the  objects  of  their  belief,  not  in  the 
form  of  mere  conceptions  which  their  intellect  accepts  as 
true,  but  rather  in  the  form  of  quasi-sensible  realities  directly 
apprehended.  As  his  sense  of  the  real  presence  of  these  ob- 
jects fluctuates,  so  the  believer  alternates  between  warmth 
and  coldness  in  his  faith.  Other  examples  will  bring  this 

^  Pensees  d'un  Solitaire,  p.  66. 


^4       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

home  to  one  better  than  abstract  description,  so  I  proceed 
immediately  to  cite  some.  The  first  example  is  a  negative 
one,  deploring  the  loss  of  the  sense  in  question.  I  have  ex- 
tracted it  from  an  account  given  me  by  a  scientific  man  of 
my  acquaintance,  of  his  religious  life.  It  seems  to  me  to  show 
clearly  that  the  feeling  of  reality  may  be  something  more 
like  a  sensation  than  an  intellectual  operation  properly  so- 
called. 

"Between  twenty  and  thirty  I  gradually  became  more  and 
more  agnostic  and  irreligious,  yet  I  cannot  say  that  I  ever 
lost  that  'indefinite  consciousness'  which  Herbert  Spencer  de- 
scribes so  well,  of  an  Absolute  Reality  behind  phenomena. 
For  me  this  Reality  was  not  the  pure  Unknowable  of  Spencer's 
philosophy,  for  although  I  had  ceased  my  childish  prayers  to 
God,  and  never  prayed  to  It  in  a  formal  manner,  yet  my  more 
recent  experience  shows  me  to  have  been  in  a  relation  to  It 
which  practically  was  the  same  thing  as  prayer.  Whenever  I  had 
any  trouble,  especially  when  I  had  conflict  with  other  people, 
either  domestically  or  in  the  way  of  business,  or  when  I  was 
depressed  in  spirits  or  anxious  about  affairs,  I  now  recognize 
that  I  used  to  fall  back  for  support  upon  this  curious  relation 
I  felt  myself  to  be  in  to  this  fundamental  cosmical  //.  It  was  on 
my  side,  or  I  was  on  Its  side,  however  you  please  to  term  it, 
in  the  particular  trouble,  and  it  always  strengthened  me  and 
seemed  to  give  me  endless  vitality  to  feel  its  underlying  and 
supporting  presence.  In  fact,  it  was  an  unfailing  fountain  of 
living  justice,  truth,  and  strength,  to  which  I  instinctively  turned 
at  times  of  weakness,  and  it  always  brought  me  out.  I  know 
now  that  it  was  a  personal  relation  I  was  in  to  it,  because  of  late 
years  the  power  of  communicating  with  it  has  left  me,  and  I  am 
conscious  of  a  perfectly  definite  loss.  I  used  never  to  fail  to  find 
it  when  I  turned  to  it.  Then  came  a  set  of  years  when  some- 
times I  found  it,  and  then  again  I  would  be  wholly  unable  to 
make  connection  with  it.  I  remember  many  occasions  on  which 
at  night  in  bed,  I  would  be  unable  to  get  to  sleep  on  account 
of  worry.  I  turned  this  way  and  that  in  the  darkness,  and  groped 
mentally  for  the  familiar  sense  of  that  higher  mind  of  my  mind 


THE  REALITY  OF   THE  UNSEEN  65 

which  had  always  seemed  to  be  close  at  hand  as  it  were,  closing 
the  passage,  and  yielding  support,  but  there  was  no  electric- 
current.  A  blank  was  there  instead  of  It:  I  couldn't  find  any- 
thing. Now,  at  the  age  of  nearly  fifty,  my  power  of  getting 
into  connection  with  it  has  entirely  left  me;  and  I  have  to  con- 
fess that  a  great  help  has  gone  out  of  my  life.  Life  has  become 
curiously  dead  and  indifferent;  and  I  can  now  see  that  my  old 
experience  was  probably  exactly  the  same  thing  as  the  prayers 
of  the  orthodox,  only  I  did  not  call  them  by  that  name.  What 
I  have  spoken  of  as  'It'  was  practically  not  Spencer's  Unknow- 
able, but  just  my  own  instinctive  and  individual  God,  whom  I 
relied  upon  for  higher  sympathy,  but  whom  somehow  I  have 
lost." 

Nothing  is  more  common  in  the  pages  of  religious  biog- 
raphy than  the  way  in  which  seasons  of  lively  and  of  dif- 
ficult faith  are  described  as  alternating.  Probably  every  re- 
ligious person  has  the  recollection  of  particular  crisis  in 
which  a  directer  vision  of  the  truth,  a  direct  perception,  per- 
haps, of  a  living  God's  existence,  swept  in  and  overwhelmed 
the  languor  of  the  more  ordinary  belief.  In  James  Russell 
Lowell's  correspondence  there  is  a  brief  memorandum  of  an 
experience  of  this  kind: — 

"I  had  a  revelation  last  Friday  evening.  I  was  at  Mary's,  and 
happening  to  say  something  of  the  presence  of  spirits  (of  whom, 
I  said,  I  was  often  dimly  aware),  Mr.  Putnam  entered  into  an 
argument  with  me  on  spiritual  matters.  As  I  was  speaking,  the 
whole  system  rose  up  before  me  like  a  vague  destiny  looming 
from  the  Abyss.  I  never  before  so  clearly  felt  the  Spirit  of  God 
in  me  and  around  nie.  The  whole  room  seemed  to  me  full  of 
God.  The  air  seemed  to  waver  to  and  fro  with  the  presence 
of  Something  I  knew  not  what.  I  spoke  with  the  calmness  and 
clearness  of  a  prophet.  I  cannot  tell  you  what  this  revelation  was. 
I  have  not  yet  studied  it  enough.  But  I  shall  perfect  it  one  day, 
and  then  you  shall  hear  it  and  acknowledge  its  grandeur."-'^ 

^  Letters  of  Lowell,  i.  75. 


66       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Here  is  a  longer  and  more  developed  experience  from  a 
manuscript  communication  by  a  clergyman — I  take  it  from 
Starbuck's  manuscript  collection: — 

"I  remember  the  night,  and  almost  the  very  spot  on  the  hill- 
top, where  my  soul  opened  out,  as  it  were,  into  the  Infinite, 
and  there  was  a  rushing  together  of  the  two  worlds,  the  inner 
and  the  outer.  It  was  deep  calling  unto  deep — the  deep  that  my 
own  struggle  had  opened  up  within  being  answered  by  the 
unfathomable  deep  without,  reaching  beyond  the  stars.  I  stood 
alone  with  Him  who  had  made  me,  and  all  the  beauty  of  the 
world,  and  love,  and  sorrow,  and  even  temptation.  I  did  not 
seek  Him,  but  felt  the  perfect  unison  of  my  spirit  with  His.  The 
ordinary  sense  of  things  around  me  faded.  For  the  moment 
nothing  but  an  ineffable  joy  and  exultation  remained.  It  is  im- 
possible fully  to  describe  the  experience.  It  was  like  the  effect 
of  some  great  orchestra  when  all  the  separate  notes  have  melted 
into  one  swelling  harmony  that  leaves  the  listener  conscious  of 
nothing  save  that  his  soul  is  being  wafted  upwards,  and  almost 
bursting  with  its  own  emotion.  The  perfect  stillness  of  the  night 
was  thrilled  by  a  more  solemn  silence.  The  darkness  held  a 
presence  that  was  all  the  more  felt  because  it  was  not  seen.  I 
could  not  any  more  have  doubted  that  He  was  there  than  that 
I  was.  Indeed,  I  felt  myself  to  be,  if  possible,  the  less  real  of  the 
two. 

"My  highest  faith  in  God  and  truest  idea  of  him  were  then 
born  in  mc.  I  have  stood  upon  the  Mount  of  Vision  since,  and 
felt  the  Eternal  round  about  me.  But  never  since  has  there  come 
quite  the  same  stirring  of  the  heart.  Then,  if  ever,  I  believe, 
I  stood  face  to  face  with  God,  and  was  born  anew  of  his  spirit. 
There  was,,  as  I  recall  it,  no  sudden  change  of  thought  or  of 
belief,  except  that  my  early  crude  conception,  had,  as  it  were, 
burst  into  flower.  There  was  no  destruction  of  the  old,  but  a 
rapid,  wonderful  unfolding.  Since  that  time  no  discussion  that 
I  have  heard  of  the  proofs  of  God's  existence  has  been  able 
to  shake  my  faith.  Having  once  felt  the  presence  of  God's 
spirit,  I  have  never  lost  it  again  for  long.  My  most  assuring 
evidence  of  his  existence  is  deeply  rooted  in  that  hour  of  vision, 
in  the  memory  of  that  supreme  experience,  and  in  the  convic- 


THE   REALITY   OF    THE    UNSEEN  67 

tion,  gained  from  reading  and  reflection,  that  something  the 
same  has  come  to  all  who  have  found  God.  I  am  aware  that  it 
may  justly  be  called  mystical.  I  am  not  enough  acquainted  with 
philosophy  to  defend  it  from  that  or  any  other  charge.  I  feel  that 
in  w»iting  of  it  I  have  overlaid  it  with  words  rather  than  pu\ 
it  clearly  to  your  thought.  But,  such  as  it  is,  I  have  described  it 
as  carefully  as  I  now  am  able  to  do." 

Here  is  another  document,  even  more  definite  in  charac- 
ter, which,  the  writer  being  a  Swiss,  I  translate  from  the 
French  original.^ 

"I  was  in  perfect  health:  we  were  on  our  sixth  day  of  tramp- 
ing, and  in  good  training.  We  had  come  the  day  before  from 
Sixt  to  Trient  by  Buet.  I  felt  neither  fatigue,  hunger,  nor  thirst, 
and  my  state  of  mind  was  equally  healthy.  I  had  had  at  Forlaz 
good  news  from  home;  I  was  subject  to  no  anxiety,  either  near 
or  remote,  for  we  had  a  good  guide,  and  there  was  not  a  shadow 
of  uncertainty  about  the  road  we  should  follow.  I  can  best 
describe  the  condition  in  which  I  was  by  calling  it  a  state  of 
equilibrium.  When  all  at  once  I  experienced  a  feeling  of  being 
raised  above  myself,  I  felt  the  presence  of  God — I  tell  of  the 
thing  just  as  I  was  conscious  of  it — as  if  his  goodness  and  his 
power  were  penetrating  me  altogether.  The  throb  of  emotion 
was  so  violent  that  I  could  barely  tell  the  boys  to  pass  on  and 
not  wait  for  me.  I  then  sat  down  on  a  stone,  unable  to  stand  any 
longer,  and  my  eyes  overflowed  with  tears.  I  thanked  God  that 
in  the  course  of  my  life  he  had  taught  me  to  know  him,  that  he 
sustained  my  life  and  took  pity  both  on  the  insignificant  creat- 
ure and  on  the  sinner  that  I  was.  I  begged  him  ardently  that 
my  life  might  be  consecrated  to  the  doing  of  his  will.  I  felt  his 
reply,  which  was  that  I  should  do  his  will  from  day  to  day, 
in  humility  and  poverty,  leaving  him,  the  Almighty  God,  to  be 
judge  of  whether  I  should  some  time  be  called  to  bear  witness 
more  conspicuously.  Then,  slowly,  the  ecstasy  left  my  heart; 
that  is,  I  felt  that  God  had  withdrawn  the  communion  which 
he  had  granted,  and  I  was  able  to  walk  on,  but  very  slowly, 

^  I  borrow  it,  with  Professor  Flournoy's  permission,  ixom  his  rich 
collection  of  psychological  documents. 


68       THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

so  strongly  was  I  still  possessed  by  the  interior  emotion.  Besides, 
I  had  wept  uninterruptedly  for  several  minutes,  my  eyes  were 
swollen,  and  I  did  not  wish  my  companions  to  see  me.  The 
state  of  ecstasy  may  have  lasted  four  or  five  minutes,  although 
it  seemed  at  the  time  to  last  much  longer.  My  comrades  waited 
for  me  ten  minutes  at  the  cross  of  Barine,  but  I  took  about 
twenty-five  or  thirty  minutes  to  join  them,  for  as  well  as  I  can 
remember,  they  said  that  I  had  kept  them  back  for  about  half 
an  hour.  The  impression  had  been  so  profound  that  in  climbing 
'slowly  the  slope  I  asked  myself  if  it  were  possible  that  Moses 
on  Sinai  could  have  had  a  more  intimate  communication  with 
God.  I  think  it  well  to  add  that  in  this  ecstasy  of  mine  God  had 
neither  form,  color,  odor,  nor  taste;  moreover,  that  the  feeling 
of  his  presence  was  accompanied  with  no  determinate  localiza- 
tion. It  was  rather  as  if  my  personality  had  been  transformed 
by  the  presence  of  a  spiritual  spirit.  But  the  more  I  seek  words 
to  express  this  intimate  intercourse,  the  more  I  feel  the  impos- 
sibility of  describing  the  thing  by  any  of  our  usual  images.  At 
bottom  the  expression  most  apt  to  render  what  I  felt  is  this: 
God  was  present,  though  invisible;  he  fell  under  no  one  of  my 
«enses,  yet  my  consciousness  perceived  him." 

The  adjective  "mystical"  is  technically  applied,  most  often, 
CO  states  that  are  of  brief  duration.  Of  course  such  hours  of 
rapture  as  the  last  two  persons  describe  are  mystical  experi- 
ences, of  which  in  a  later  lecture  I  shall  have  much  to  say. 
Meanwhile  here  is  the  abridged  record  of  another  mystical 
or  semi-mystical  experience,  in  a  mind  evidently  framed  by 
nature  for  ardent  piety.  I  owe  it  to  Starbuck's  collection.  The 
lady  who  gives  the  account  is  the  daughter  of  a  man  well 
known  in  his  time  as  a  writer  against  Christianity.  The  sud- 
denness of  her  conversion  shows  well  how  native  the  sense 
of  God's  presence  must  be  to  certain  minds.  She  relates  that 
she  was  brought  up  in  entire  ignorance  of  Christian  doc- 
trine, but,  when  in  Germany,  after  being  talked  to  by  Chris- 
tian friends,  she  read  the  Bible  and  prayed,  and  finally  the 
plan  of  salvation  flashed  upon  her  like  a  stream  of  light. 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN  69 

"To  this  day,"  she  writes,  "I  cannot  understand  dallying 
with  religion  and  the  commands  of  God.  The  very  instant  I 
heard  my  Father's  cry  calling  unto  me,  my  heart  bounded  in 
recognition.  I  ran,  I  stretched  forth  my  arms,  I  cried  aloud, 
'Here,  here  I  am,  my  Father.'  Oh,  happy  child,  what  should 
I  do?  'Love  me,'  answered  my  God.  'I  do,  I  do,'  I  cried  pas- 
sionately. 'Come  unto  me,'  called  my  Father.  'I  will,'  my  hear' 
panted.  Did  I  stop  to  ask  a  single  question?  Not  one.  It  never 
occurred  to  me  to  ask  whether  I  was  good  enough,  or  to 
hesitate  over  my  unfitness,  or  to  find  out  what  I  thought  of  hir> 
church,  or  ...  to  wait  until  I  should  be  satisfied.  Satisfied! 
I  was  satisfied.  Had  I  not  found  my  God  and  my  Father?  Did 
he  not  love  me?  Had  he  not  called  me?  Was  there  not  a  Church 
into  which  I  might  enter?  .  .  .  Since  then  I  have  had  direct 
answers  to  prayer — so  significant  as  to  be  almost  like  talking 
with  God  and  hearing  his  answer.  The  idea  of  God's  reality 
has  never  left  me  for  one  moment." 

Here  is  still  another  case,  the  writer  being  a  man  aged 
twenty-seven,  in  which  the  experience,  probably  almost  as 
characteristic,  is  less  vividly  described: — 

"I  have  on  a  number  of  occasions  felt  that  I  had  enjoyed  a 
period  of  intimate  communion  with  the  divine.  These  meetings 
came  unasked  and  unexpected,  and  seemed  to  consist  merely  in 
the  temporary  obliteration  of  the  conventionalities  which  usually 
surround  and  cover  my  life.  .  .  .  Once  it  was  when  from  the 
summit  of  a  high  mountain  I  looked  over  a  gashed  and  cor- 
rugated landscape  extending  to  a  long  convex  of  ocean  that 
ascended  to  the  horizon,  and  again  from  the  same  point  when  1 
could  see  nothing  beneath  me  but  a  boundless  expanse  of  white 
cloud,  on  the  blown  surface  of  which  a  few  high  peaks,  includ- 
ing the  one  I  was  on,  seemed  plunging  about  as  if  they  were 
dragging  their  anchors.  What  I  felt  on  these  occasions  was  s 
temporary  loss  of  my  own  identity,  accompanied  by  an  illumi- 
nation which  revealed  to  me  a  deeper  significance  than  I  had 
been  wont  to  attach  to  life.  It  is  in  this  that  I  find  my  justifi' 
cation  for  saying  that  I  have  enjoyed  communication  with  God. 
Of  course  the  absence  of  such  a  being  as  this  would  be  chaos. 
I  cannot  conceive  of  life  without  its  presence." 


•/O       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Of  the  more  habitual  and  so  to  speak  chronic  sense  of 
God's  presence  the  following  sample  from  Professor  Star- 
buck's  manuscript  collection  may  serve  to  give  an  idea.  It  is 
from  a  man  aged  forty-nine — probably  thousands  of  unpre- 
tending Christians  would  write  an  almost  identical  account. 

"God  is  more  real  to  me  than  any  thought  or  thing  or  per- 
son. I  feel  his  presence  positively,  and  the  more  as  I  live  in 
closer  harmony  with  his  laws  as  written  in  my  body  and  mind. 
[  feel  him  in  the  sunshine  or  rain;  and  awe  mingled  with  a 
delicious  restfulness  most  nearly  describes  my  feelings.  I  talk 
to  him  as  to  a  companion  in  prayer  and  praise,  and  our  com- 
munion is  delightful.  He  answers  me  again  and  again,  often 
in  words  so  clearly  spoken  that  it  seems  my  outer  ear  must 
have  carried  the  tone,  but  generally  in  strong  mental  impres- 
sions. Usually  a  text  of  Scripture,  unfolding  some  new  view 
of  him  and  his  love  for  me,  and  care  for  my  safety.  I  could 
give  hundreds  of  instances,  in  school  matters,  social  problems, 
financial  difficulties,  etc.  That  he  is  mine  and  I  am  his  never 
leaves  me,  it  is  an  abiding  joy.  Without  it  life  would  be  a  blank, 
a  desert,  a  shoreless,  trackless  waste." 

I  subjoin  some  more  examples  from  writers  of  different 
ages  and  sexes.  They  are  also  from  Professor  Starbuck's  col- 
lection, and  their  number  might  be  greatly  multiplied.  The 
first  is  from  a  man  twenty-seven  years  old : — 

"God  is  quite  real  to  me.  I  talk  to  him  and  often  get  answers. 
Thoughts  sudden  and  distinct  from  any  I  have  been  entertain- 
ing come  to  my  mind  after  asking  God  for  his  direction.  Some- 
thing over  a  year  ago  I  was  for  some  weeks  in  the  direst  per- 
plexity. When  the  trouble  first  appeared  before  me  I  was  dazed, 
but  before  long  (two  or  three  hours)  I  could  hear  distinctly  a 
passage  of  Scripture:  'My  grace  is  sufficient  for  thee.'  Every 
time  my  thoughts  turned  to  the  trouble  I  could  hear  this  quo- 
tation. I  don't  think  I  ever  doubted  the  existence  of  God,  or  had 
him  drop  out  of  my  consciousness.  God  has  frequently  stepped 
into  my  affairs  very  perceptibly,  and  I  feel  that  he  directs  many 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN  7I 

little  details  all  the  time.  But  on  two  or  three  occasions  he  has 
ordered  ways  for  me  very  contrary  to  my  ambitions  and  plans." 

Another  statement  (none  the  less  valuable  psychologically 
for  being  so  decidedly  childish)  is  that  of  a  boy  of  seven- 
teen : — 

"Sometimes  as  I  go  to  church,  I  sit  down,  join  in  the  service, 
and  before  I  go  out  I  feel  as  if  God  was  with  me,  right  side  of 
me,  singing  and  reading  the  Psalms  with  me.  .  .  .  And  then 
again  I  feel  as  if  I  could  sit  beside  him,  and  put  my  arms  around 
him,  kiss  him,  etc.  When  I  am  taking  Holy  Communion  at  the 
altar,  I  try  to  get  with  him  and  generally  feel  his  presence." 

I  let  a  few  other  cases  follow  at  random : — 

"God  surrounds  me  like  the  physical  atmosphere.  He  is  closer 
to  me  than  my  own  breath.  In  him  literally  I  live  and  move  and 
have  my  being." — 

"There  are  times  when  I  seem  to  stand  in  his  very  presence, 
to  talk  with  him.  Answers  to  prayer  have  come,  sometimes  di- 
rect and  overwhelming  in  their  revelation  of  his  presence  and 
powers.  There  are  times  when  God  seems  far  off,  but  this  is 
always  my  own  fault." — 

"I  have  the  sense  of  a  presence,  strong,  and  at  the  same  time 
soothing,  which  hovers  over  me.  Sometimes  it  seems  to  enwrap 
me  with  sustaining  arms." 

Such  is  the  human  ontological  imagination,  and  such  is 
the  convincingness  of  what  it  brings  to  birth.  Unpicturable 
beings  are  realized,  and  realized  with  an  intensity  almost 
like  that  of  an  hallucination.  They  determine  our  vital  atti- 
tude as  decisively  as  the  vital  attitude  of  lovers  is  determined 
by  the  habitual  sense,  by  which  each  is  haunted,  of  the  other 
being  in  the  world.  A  lover  has  notoriously  this  sense  of  the 
continuous  being  of  his  idol,  even  when  his  attention  is  ad- 
dressed to  other  matters  and  he  no  longer  represents  hei 
features.  He  cannot  forget  her;  she  uninterruptedly  affects 
him  through  and  through. 


72      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

I  spoke  of  the  convincingness  of  these  feelings  of  reahty, 
and  I  must  dwell  a  moment  longer  on  that  point.  They  are 
as  convincing  to  those  who  have  them  as  any  direct  sensible 
experiences  can  be,  and  they  are,  as  a  rule,  much  more  con- 
vincing than  results  established  by  mere  logic  ever  are.  One 
may  indeed  be  entirely  without  them;  probably  more  than 
one  of  you  here  present  is  without  them  in  any  marked  de- 
gree; but  if  you  do  have  them,  and  have  them  at  all  strongly, 
the  probability  is  that  you  cannot  help  regarding  them  as 
genuine  perceptions  of  truth,  as  revelations  of  a  kind  of  re- 
ality which  no  adverse  argument,  however  unanswerable  by 
you  in  words,  can  expel  from  your  belief.  The  opinion  op- 
posed to  mysticism  in  philosophy  is  sometimes  spoken  of  as 
rationalism.  Rationalism  insists  that  all  our  beliefs  ought  ul- 
timately to  find  for  themselves  articulate  grounds.  Such 
grounds,  for  rationalism,  must  consist  of  four  things:  (i) 
definitely  statable  abstract  principles;  (2)  definite  facts  of 
sensation;  (3)  definite  hypotheses  based  on  such  facts;  and 
(4)  definite  inferences  logically  drawn.  Vague  impressions 
of  something  indefinable  have  no  place  in  the  rationalistic 
system,  which  on  its  positive  side  is  surely  a  splendid  intel- 
lectual tendency,  for  not  only  are  all  our  philosophies  fruits 
of  it,  but  physical  science  (amongst  other  good  things)  is  its 
result. 

Nevertheless,  if  we  look  on  man's  whole  mental  life  as  it 
exists,  on  the  life  of  men  that  lies  in  them  apart  from  their 
learning  and  science,  and  that  they  inwardly  and  privately 
follow,  we  have  to  confess  that  the  part  of  it  of  which  ration- 
alism can  give  an  account  is  relatively  superficial.  It  is  the 
part  that  has  the  prestige  undoubtedly,  for  it  has  the  loquac- 
ity, it  can  challenge  you  for  proofs,  and  chop  logic,  and  put 
you  down  with  words.  But  it  will  fail  to  convince  or  convert 
you  all  the  same,  if  your  dumb  intuitions  are  opposed  to  its 
conclusions.  If  you  have  intuitions  at  all,  they  come  from  a 
deeper  level  of  your  nature  than  the  loquacious  level  which 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE   UNSEEN  7^ 

rationalism  inhabits.  Your  whole  subconscious  life,  your  im- 
pulses, your  faiths,  your  needs,  your  divinations,  have  pre- 
pared the  premises,  of  which  your  consciousness  now  feels 
the  weight  of  the  result;  and  something  in  you  absolutely 
\nows  that  that  result  must  be  truer  than  any  logic-chop- 
ping rationalistic  talk,  however  clever,  that  may  contradict 
it.  This  inferiority  of  the  rationalistic  level  in  founding  belief 
is  just  as  manifest  when  rationalism  argues  for  religion  as 
when  it  argues  against  it.  That  vast  literature  of  proofs  of 
God's  existence  drawn  from  the  order  of  nature,  which  a 
century  ago  seemed  so  overwhelmingly  convincing,  to-day 
does  little  more  than  gather  dust  in  libraries,  for  the  simple 
reason  that  our  generation  has  ceased  to  believe  in  the  kind 
of  God  it  argued  for.  Whatever  sort  of  a  being  God  may  be, 
we  hjiow  to-day  that  he  is  nevermore  that  mere  external  in- 
ventor of  "contrivances"  intended  to  make  manifest  hi? 
"glory"  in  which  our  great-grandfathers  took  such  satisfac- 
tion, though  just  how  we  know  this  we  cannot  possibly 
make  clear  by  words  either  to  others  or  to  ourselves.  I  defy 
any  of  you  here  fully  to  account  for  your  persuasion  that  if 
a  God  exist  he  must  be  a  more  cosmic  and  tragic  personage 
than  that  Being. 

The  truth  is  that  in  the  metaphysical  and  religious  sphere, 
articulate  reasons  are  cogent  for  us  only  when  our  inarticu- 
late feelings  of  reality  have  already  been  impressed  in  favor 
of  the  same  conclusion.  Then,  indeed,  our  intuitions  and  our 
reason  work  together,  and  great  world-ruling  systems,  like 
that  of  the  Buddhist  or  of  the  Catholic  philosophy,  may 
grow  up.  Our  impulsive  belief  is  here  always  what  sets  up 
the  original  body  of  truth,  and  our  articulately  verbalized 
philosophy  is  but  its  showy  translation  into  formulas.  The 
unreasoned  and  immediate  assurance  is  the  deep  thing  in  us, 
the  reasoned  argument  is  but  a  surface  exhibition.  Instinct 
leads,  intelligence  does  but  follow.  If  a  person  feels  the  pres- 
ence of  a  living  God  after  the  fashion  shown  by  my  quota- 


74       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tions,  your  critical  arguments,  be  they  never  so  superior,  will 
vainly  set  themselves  to  change  his  faith. 

Please  observe,  however,  that  I  do  not  yet  say  that  it  is  bet- 
ter that  the  subconscious  and  non-rational  should  thus  hold 
primacy  in  the  religious  realm.  I  confine  myself  to  simply 
pointing  out  that  they  do  so  hold  it  as  a  matter  of  fact. 

So  much  for  our  sense  of  the  reality  of  the  religious  ob- 
jects. Let  me  now  say  a  brief  word  more  about  the  attitudes 
they  characteristically  awaken. 

We  have  already  agreed  that  they  are  solemn;  and  we 
have  seen  reason  to  think  that  the  most  distinctive  of  them  is 
the  sort  of  joy  which  may  result  in  extreme  cases  from  abso- 
lute self-surrender.  The  sense  of  the  kind  of  object  to  which 
the  surrender  is  made  has  much  to  do  with  determining  the 
precise  complexion  of  the  joy;  and  the  whole  phenomenon  is 
more  complex  than  any  simple  formula  allows.  In  the  litera- 
ture of  the  subject,  sadness  and  gladness  have  each  been  em- 
phasized in  turn.  The  ancient  saying  that  the  first  maker  of 
the  Gods  was  fear  receives  voluminous  corroboration  from 
every  age  of  religious  history;  but  none  the  less  does  reli- 
gious history  show  the  part  which  joy  has  evermore  tended  to 
play.  Sometimes  the  joy  has  been  primary;  sometimes  sec- 
ondary, being  the  gladness  of  deliverance  from  the  fear. 
This  latter  state  of  things,  being  the  more  complex,  is  also 
the  more  complete;  and  as  we  proceed,  I  think  we  shall  have 
abundant  reason  for  refusing  to  leave  out  either  the  sadness 
or  the  gladness,  if  we  look  at  religion  with  the  breadth  of 
view  which  it  demands.  Stated  in  the  completest  possible 
terms,  a  man's  religion  involves  both  moods  of  contraction 
and  moods  of  expansion  of  his  being.  But  the  quantitative 
mixture  and  order  of  these  moods  vary  so  much  from  one 
age  of  the  world,  from  one  system  of  thought,  and  from  one 
individual  to  another,  that  you  may  insist  either  on  the 
dread  and  the  submission,  or  on  the  peace  and  the  freedom 
as  the  essence  of  the  matter,  and  still  remain  materially 


THE   REALITY   OF   THE    UNSEEN  75 

within  the  hmits  of  the  truth.  The  constitutionally  sombre 
and  the  constitutionally  sanguine  onlooker  are  bound  to  em- 
phasize opposite  aspects  of  what  lies  before  their  eyes. 

The  constitutionally  sombre  religious  person  makes  even 
of  his  religious  peace  a  very  sober  thing.  Danger  still  hovers 
in  the  air  about  it.  Flexion  and  contraction  are  not  wholly 
checked.  It  were  sparrowlike  and  childish  after  our  deliver- 
ance to  explode  into  twittering  laughter  and  caper-cutting, 
and  utterly  to  forget  the  imminent  hawk  on  bough.  Lie  low, 
rather,  lie  low;  for  you  are  in  the  hands  of  a  living  God.  In 
the  Book  of  Job,  for  example,  the  impotence  of  man  and  tb: 
omnipotence  of  God  is  the  exclusive  burden  of  its  author's 
mind.  "It  is  as  high  as  heaven;  what  canst  thou  do? — deeper 
than  hell;  what  canst  thou  know?'.'  There  is  an  astringent 
relish  about  the  truth  of  this  conviction  which  some  men 
can  feel,  and  which  for  them  is  as  near  an  approach  as  can 
be  made  to  the  feeling  of  religious  joy. 

"In  Job,"  says  that  coldly  truthful  writer,  the  author  of  Mark 
Rutherford,  "God  reminds  us  that  man  is  not  the  measure 
of  his  creation.  The  world  is  immense,  constructed  on  no  plan 
or  theory  which  the  intellect  of  man  can  grasp.  It  is  transcendent 
everywhere.  This  is  the  burden  of  every  verse,  and  is  the  secret, 
if  there  be  one,  of  the  poem.  Sufficient  or  insufficient,  there  is 
nothing  more.  .  .  .  God  is  great,  we  know  not  his  ways.  He 
takes  from  us  all  we  have,  but  yet  if  we  possess  our  souls  in 
patience,  we  may  pass  the  valley  of  the  shadow,  and  come  out 
in  sunlight  again.  We  may  or  we  may  not!  .  .  .  What  more 
have  we  to  say  now  than  God  said  from  the  whirlwind  over 
two  thousand  five  hundred  years  ago?"^ 

If  we  turn  to  the  sanguine  onlooker,  on  the  other  hand, 
we  find  that  deliverance  is  felt  as  incomplete  unless  the  bur- 
den be  altogether  overcome  and  the  danger  forgotten.  Such 
onlookers  give  us  definitions  that  seem  to  the  sombre  minds 

^  Mark  Rutherford's  Deliverance,  London,  1885,  pp.  196,  198. 


^6       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

of  whom  we  have  just  been  speaking  to  leave  out  all  the  sol- 
emnity that  makes  religious  peace  so  different  from  merely 
animal  joys.  In  the  opinion  of  some  writers  an  attitude 
might  be  called  religious,  though  no  touch  were  left  in  it  of 
sacrifice  or  submission,  no  tendency  to  flexion,  no  bowing  of 
the  head.  Any  "habitual  and  regulated  admiration,"  says 
Professor  J.  R.  Seeley,^  "is  worthy  to  be  called  a  religion"; 
and  accordingly  he  thinks  that  our  Music,  our  Science,  and 
our  so-called  "Civilization,"  as  these  things  are  now  organ- 
ized and  admiringly  believed  in,  form  the  more  genuine  re- 
ligions of  our  time.  Certainly  the  unhesitating  and  unreason- 
ing way  in  which  we  feel  that  we  must  inflict  our  civiliza- 
tion upon  "lower"  races,  by  means  of  Hotchkiss  guns,  etc., 
reminds  one  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  the  early  spirit  of  Is- 
lam spreading  its  religion  by  the  sword. 

In  my  last  lecture  I  quoted  to  you  the  ultra-radical  opinion 
of  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis,  that  laughter  of  any  sort  may  be  con- 
sidered a  religious  exercise,  for  it  bears  witness  to  the  soul's 
emancipation.  I  quoted  this  opinion  in  order  to  deny  its  ade- 
quacy. But  we  must  now  settle  our  scores  more  carefully 
with  this  whole  optimistic  way  of  thinking.  It  is  far  too  com- 
plex to  be  decided  off-hand.  I  propose  accordingly  that  we 
make  of  religious  optimism  the  theme  of  the  next  two 
lectures. 

■>  In  his  book  (too  little  read,  I  fear),  Natural  Religion,  3d  edition, 
/loston,  1886,  pp.  91,  laa. 


Lectures  IV  and  V 

THE   RELIGION   OF   HEALTHY- 
MINDEDNESS 

IF  we  were  to  ask  the  question:  "What  is  human  life's 
chief  concern?"  one  of  the  answers  we  should  receive 
would  be:  "It  is  happiness."  How  to  gain,  how  to  keep,  how 
to  recover  happiness,  is  in  fact  for  most  men  at  all  times  the 
secret  motive  of  all  they  do,  and  of  all  they  are  willing  to  en- 
dure. The  hedonistic  school  in  ethics  deduces  the  moral  life 
wholly  from  the  experiences  of  happiness  and  unhappiness 
which  different  kinds  of  conduct  bring;  and,  even  more  in 
the  religious  life  than  in  the  moral  life,  happiness  and  un- 
happiness seem  to  be  the  poles  round  which  the  interest  re- 
volves. We  need  not  go  so  far  as  to  say  with  the  author 
whom  I  lately  quoted  that  any  persistent  enthusiasm  is,  as 
such,  religion,  nor  need  we  call  mere  laughter  a  religious  ex- 
ercise; but  we  must  admit  that  any  persistent  enjoyment 
may  produce  the  sort  of  religion  which  consists  in  a  grateful 
admiration  of  the  gift  of  so  happy  an  existence;  and  we 
must  also  acknowledge  that  the  more  complex  ways  of  eX' 
periencing  religion  are  new  manners  of  producing  happi- 
ness, wonderful  inner  paths  to  a  supernatural  kind  of  hap- 
piness, when  the  first  gift  of  natural  existence  is  unhappy,  as 
it  so  often  proves  itself  to  be. 

With  such  relations  between  religion  and  happiness,  it  is 
perhaps  not  surprising  that  men  come  to  regard  the  happi- 
ness which  a  religious  belief  affords  as  a  proof  of  its  truth.  If 
a  creed  makes  a  man  feel  happy,  he  almost  inevitably  adopts 
it.  Such  a  belief  ought  to  be  true;  therefore  it  is  true — such, 

77 


yS       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

rightly  or  wrongly,  is  one  of  the  "immediate  inferences"  of 
the  religious  logic  used  by  ordinary  men. 

"The  near  presence  of  God's  spirit,"  says  a  German  writer,^ 
"may  be  experienced  in  its  reality — indeed  only  experienced. 
And  the  mark  by  which  the  spirit's  existence  and  nearness  are 
made  irrefutably  clear  to  those  who  have  ever  had  the  experience 
is  the  utterly  incomparable  feeling  of  happiness  which  is  con- 
nected with  the  nearness,  and  which  is  therefore  not  only  a 
possible  and  altogether  f)roper  feeling  for  us  to  have  here  be- 
low, but  is  the  best  and  most  indispensable  proof  of  God's 
reality.  No  other  proof  is  equally  convincing,  and  therefore  hap- 
piness is  the  point  from  which  every  efficacious  new  theology 
should  start." 

In  the  hour  immediately  before  us,  I  shall  invite  you  to 
consider  the  simpler  kinds  of  religious  happiness,  leaving 
the  more  complex  sorts  to  be  treated  on  a  later  day. 

In  many  persons,  happiness  is  congenital  and  irreclaim- 
able. "Cosmic  emotion"  inevitably  takes  in  them  the  form  of 
enthusiasm  and  freedom.  I  speak  not  only  of  those  who  are 
animally  happy.  I  mean  those  who,  when  unhappiness  is  of- 
fered or  proposed  to  them,  positively  refuse  to  feel  it,  as  if  it 
were  something  mean  and  wrong.  We  find  such  persons  in 
every  age,  passionately  flinging  themselves  upon  their  sense 
of  the  goodness  of  life,  in  spite  of  the  hardships  of  their  own 
condition,  and  in  spite  of  the  sinister  theologies  into  which 
they  may  be  born.  From  the  outset  their  religion  is  one  of 
union  with  the  divine.  The  heretics  who  went  before  the  ref- 
ormation are  lavishly  accused  by  the  church  writers  of  an- 
tinomian  practices,  just  as  the  first  Christians  were  accused 
of  indulgence  in  orgies  by  the  Romans.  It  is  probable  that 
there  never  has  been  a  century  in  which  the  deliberate  re- 
fusal to  think  ill  of  life  has  not  been  ideaKzed  by  a  sufficient 
number  of  persons  to  form  sects,  open  or  secret,  who  claimed 

^C.  Hilty:  Gliick,  dritter  Theil,  1900,  p.  18. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         79 

all  natural  things  to  be  permitted.  Saint  Augustine's  maxim, 
Dilige  et  quod  vis  jac — if  you  but  love  [God],  you  may  do 
as  you  incline — is  morally  one  of  the  profoundest  of  obser- 
vations, yet  it  is  pregnant,  for  such  persons,  with  passports 
beyond  the  bounds  of  conventional  morality.  According  to 
their  characters  they  have  been  refined  or  gross;  but  their  be- 
lief has  been  at  all  times  systematic  enough  to  constitute  a 
definite  religious  attitude.  God  was  for  them  a  giver  of  free- 
dom, and  the  sting  of  evil  was  overcome.  Saint  Francis  and 
his  immediate  disciples  were,  on  the  whole,  of  this  company 
of  spirits,  of  which  there  are  of  course  infinite  varieties. 
Rousseau  in  the  earlier  years  of  his  writing,  Diderot,  B.  de 
Saint  Pierre,  and  many  of  the  leaders  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury anti-christian  movement  were  of  this  optimistic  type. 
They  owed  their  influence  to  a  certain  authoritativeness  in 
their  feeling  that  Nature,  if  you  will  only  trust  her  sufficient- 
ly, is  absolutely  good. 

It  is  to  be  hoped  that  we  all  have  some  friend,  perhaps 
more  often  feminine  than  masculine,  and  young  than  old. 
whose  soul  is  of  this  sky-blue  tint,  whose  affinities  are  rather 
with  flowers  and  birds  and  all  enchanting  innocencies  than 
with  dark  human  passions,  who  can  think  no  ill  of  man  ot 
God,  and  in  whom  religious  gladness,  being  in  possession 
from  the  outset,  needs  no  deliverance  from  any  antecedent 
burden. 

"God  has  two  families  of  children  on  this  earth,"  says  Fran- 
cis W.  Newman,^  'Hhe  once-born  and  the  twice-born"  and  the 
once-born  he  describes  as  follows:  "They  see  God,  not  as  a 
strict  Judge,  not  as  a  Glorious  Potentate;  but  as  the  animating 
Spirit  of  a  beautiful  harmonious  world.  Beneficent  and  Kind, 
Merciful  as  well  as  Pure.  The  same  characters  generally  have 
no  metaphysical  tendencies:  they  do  not  look  back  into  them- 
selves. Hence  they  are  not  distressed  by  their  own  imperfec 

^  The  Soul;  its  Sorrows  and  its  Aspirations,  3d  edidon,  1852,  pp 
89,  91. 


8o       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tions:  yet  it  would  be  absurd  to  call  them  self-righteous;  for 
they  hardly  think  of  themselves  at  all.  This  childlike  quality 
of  their  nature  makes  the  opening  of  religion  very  happy  to 
them:  for  they  no  more  shrink  from  God,  than  a  child  from  an 
emperor,  before  whom  the  parent  trembles:  in  fact,  they  have 
no  vivid  conception  of  any  of  the  qualities  in  which  the  severer 
Majesty  of  God  consists.^  He  is  to  them  the  impersonation  of 
Kindness  and  Beauty.  They  read  his  character,  not  in  the  dis- 
ordered world  of  rnan,  but  in  romantic  and  harmonious  nature. 
Of  human  sin  they  know  perhaps  little  in  their  own  hearts  and 
not  very  much  in  the  world;  and  human  suffering  does  but 
melt  them  to  tenderness.  Thus,  when  they  approach  God,  no 
inward  disturbance  ensues;  and  without  being  as  yet  spiritual, 
they  have  a  certain  complacency  and  perhaps  romantic  sense 
of  excitement  in  their  simple  worship." 

In  the  Romish  Church  such  characters  find  a  more  con- 
genial soil  to  grow  in  than  in  Protestantism,  whose  fashions 
of  feeling  have  been  set  by  minds  of  a  decidedly  pessimistic 
order.  But  even  in  Protestantism  they  have  been  abundant 
enough;  and  in  its  recent  "liberal"  developments  of  Unitari- 
anism  and  latitudinarianism  generally,  minds  of  this  order 
have  played  and  still  are  playing  leading  and  constructive 
parts.  Emerson  himself  is  an  admirable  example.  Theodore 
Parker  is  another — here  are  a  couple  or  characteristic  pas- 
sages from  Parker's  correspondence." 

"Orthodox  scholars  say:  'In  the  heathen  classics  you  find  no 
consciousness  of  sin.'  It  is  very  true — God  be  thanked  for  it. 
They  were  conscious  of  wrath,  of  cruelty,  avarice,  drunkenness, 
lust,  sloth,  cowardice,  and  other  actual  vices,  and  struggled 
and  got  rid  of  the  deformities,  but  they  were  not  conscious  of 
'enmity  against  God,'  and  didn't  sit  down  and  whine  and  groan 
against  non-existent  evil.  I  have  done  wrong  things  enough  in 
my  life,  and  do  them  now;  I  miss  the  mark,  draw  bow,  and 

^  I  once  heard  a  lady  describe  the  pleasure  it  gave  her  to  think 
that  she  "could  always  cuddle  up  to  God." 

^JoHN  Weiss:  Life  of  Theodore  Parker,  i.  152,  32. 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         8l 

try  again.  But  I  am  not  conscious  of  hating  God,  or  man,  or 
right,  or  love,  and  I  know  there  is  much  'health  in  me';  and  in 
my  body,  even  now,  there  dwelleth  many  a  good  thing,  spite  of 
consumption  and  Saint  Paul."  In  another  letter  Parker  writes^ 
"I  have  swum  in  clear  sweet  waters  all  my  days;  and  if  some- 
times they  were  a  little  cold,  and  the  stream  ran  adverse  and- 
something  rough,  it  was  never  too  strong  to  be  breasted  and 
swum  through.  From  the  days  of  earliest  boyhood,  when  I 
went  stumbling  through  the  grass,  ...  up  to  the  gray-bearded 
manhood  of  this  time,  there  is  none  but  has  left  me  honey  in 
the  hive  of  memory  that  I  now  feed  on  for  present  delight. 
When  I  recall  the  years  ...  I  am  filled  with  a  sense  of  sweet- 
ness and  wonder  that  such  little  things  can  make  a  mortal  so 
exceedingly  rich.  But  I  must  confess  that  the  chiefest  of  all  my 
delights  is  still  the  religious." 

Another  good  expression  of  the  "once-born"  type  of  con- 
sciousness, developing  straight  and  natural,  with  no  element 
of  morbid  compunction  or  crisis,  is  contained  in  the  answer 
of  Dr.  Edward  Everett  Hale,  the  eminent  Unitarian  preach- 
er and  writer,  to  one  of  Dr.  Starbuck's  circulars.  I  quote  a 
part  of  it: — 

"I  observe,  with  profound  regret,  the  religious  struggles 
which  come  into  many  biographies,  as  if  almost  essential  to 
the  formation  of  the  hero.  I  ought  to  speak  of  these,  to  say  that 
any  man  has  an  advantage,  not  to  be  estimated,  who  is  born,  as 
I  was,  into  a  family  where  the  religion'  is  simple  and  rational; 
who  is  trained  in  the  theory  of  such  a  religion,  so  that  he  never 
knows,  for  an  hour,  what  these  religious  or  irreligious  struggles 
are.  I  always  knew  God  loved  me,  and  I  was  always  grateful  to 
him  for  the  world  he  placed  me  in.  I  always  liked  to  tell  him 
so,  and  was  always  glad  to  receive  his  suggestions  to  me.  .  .  . 
I  can  remember  perfectly  that  when  I  was  coming  to  manhood, 
the  half-philosophical  novels  of  the  time  had  a  deal  to  say  about 
the  young  men  and  maidens  who  were  facing  the  'problem  of 
life.'  I  had  no  idea  whatever  what  the  problem  of  life  was.  To 
live  with  all  my  might  seemed  to  me  easy;  to  learn  where  there 
was  so  much  to  learn  seemed  pleasant  and  almost  of  course;  to 


82       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

lend  a  hand,  if  one  had  a  chance,  natural;  and  if  one  did  this, 
why,  he  enjoyed  Hfe  because  he  could  not  help  it,  and  without 
proving  to  himself  that  he  ought  to  enjoy  it.  .  .  .  A  child  who 
is  early  taught  that  he  is  God's  child,  that  he  may  live  and  move 
and  have  his  being  in  God,  and  that  he  has,  therefore,  infinite 
strength  at  hand  for  the  conquering  of  any  difficulty,  will  take 
life  more  easily,  and  probably  will  make  more  of  it,  than  one 
who  is  told  that  he  is  born  the  child  of  wrath  and  wholly  in- 
capable of  good."^ 

One  can  but  recognize  in  such  writers  as  these  the  pres- 
ence of  a  temperament  organically  weighted  on  the  side  of 
cheer  and  fatally  forbidden  to  linger,  as  those  of  opposite 
temperament  linger,  over  the  darker  aspects  of  the  universe. 
In  some  individuals  optimism  may  become  quasi-patholog- 
ical. The  capacity  for  even  a  transient  sadness  or  a  momen- 
tary humility  seems  cut  oflF  from  them  as  by  a  kind  of  con- 
genital anzesthesia." 

'  Starbuck:  Psychology  of  Religion,  pp.  305,  306. 

-  "I  know  not  to  what  physical  laws  philosophers  vidll  some  day 
refer  the  feelings  of  melancholy.  For  myself,  I  find  that  they  are  the 
most  voluptuous  of  all  sensations,"  writes  Saint  Pierre,  and  accord- 
ingly he  devotes  a  series  of  sections  of  his  work  on  Nature  to  the 
Plaisirs  de  la  Ruine,  Plaisirs  des  Tombeaux,  Ruines  de  la  Nature, 
Plaisirs  de  la  Solitude — each  of  them  more  optimistic  than  the  last. 

This  finding  of  a  luxury  in  woe  is  very  common  during  adoles- 
cence. The  truth-telling  Marie  Bashkirtsefif  expresses  it  well: — 

"In  this  depression  an'd  dreadful  uninterrupted  suffering,  I  don't 
condemn  life.  On  the  contrary,  I  like  it  and  find  it  good.  Can  you 
believe  it?  I  find  everything  good  and  pleasant,  even  my  tears,  my 
grief.  I  enjoy  weeping,  I  enjoy  my  despair.  I  enjoy  being  exasperated 
■md  sad.  I  feel  as  if  these  were  so  many  diversions,  and  I  love  life 
in  spite  of  them  all.  I  want  to  live  on.  It  would  be  cruel  to  have 
me  die  when  I  am  so  accommodadng.  I  cry,  I  grieve,  and  at  the 
same  time  I  am  pleased — no,  not  exacdy  that — I  know  not  how  to 
express  it.  But  everything  in  life  pleases  me.  I  find  everything  agree- 
able, and  in  the  very  midst  of  my  prayers  for  happiness,  I  find  my- 
self happy  at  being  miserable.  It  is  not  I  who  undergo  all  this— my 
body  weeps  and  cries;  but  something  inside  of  me  which  is  above 
me  is  glad  of  it  all."  Journal  de  Marie  BashkirtsefT,  i.  67. 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         83 

The  supreme  contemporary  example  of  such  an  inabiUty 
to  feel  evil  is  of  course  Walt  Whitman. 

"His  favorite  occupation,"  writes  his  disciple,  Dr.  Bucke, 
"seemed  to  be  strolling  or  sauntering  about  outdoors  by  him- 
self, looking  at  the  grass,  the  trees,  the  flowers,  the  vistas  of 
light,  the  varying  aspects  of  the  sky,  and  listening  to  the  birds, 
the  crickets,  the  tree  frogs,  and  all  the  hundreds  of  natural 
sounds.  It  was  evident  that  these  things  gave  him  a  pleasure  far 
beyond  what  they  give  to  ordinary  people.  Until  I  knew  the 
man,"  continues  Dr.  Bucke,  "it  had  not  occurred  to  me  that  any 
one  could  derive  so  much  absolute  happiness  from  these  things 
as  he  did.  He  was  very  fond  of  flowers,  either  wild  or  cultivated; 
liked  all  sorts.  I  think  he  admired  lilacs  and  sunflowers  just  as 
much  as  roses.  Perhaps,  indeed,  no  man  who  ever  lived  liked 
so  many  things  and  disliked  so  few  as  Walt  Whitman.  All 
natural  objects  seemed  to  have  a  charm  for  him.  All  sights  and 
sounds  seemed  to  please  him.  He  appeared  to  like  (and  I  believe 
he  did  like)  all  the  men,  women,  and  children  he  saw  (though 
I  never  knew  him  to  say  that  he  liked  any  one),  but  each  who 
knew  him  felt  that  he  liked  him  or  her,  and  that  he  liked  others 
also.  I  never  knew  him  to  argue  or  dispute,  and  he  never  spoke 
about  money.  He  always  justified,  sometimes  playfully,  some- 
times quite  seriously,  those  who  spoke  harshly  of  himself  or 
his  writings,  and  I  often  thought  he  even  took  pleasure  in  the 
opposition  of  enemies.  When  I  first  knew  [him],  I  used  to 
think  that  he  watched  himself,  and  would  not  allow  his  tongue 
to  give  expression  to  fretfulness,  antipathy,  complaint,  and 
remonstrance.  It  did  not  occur  to  me  as  possible  that  these  men- 
tal states  could  be  absent  in  him.  After  long  observation,  how- 
ever, I  satisfied  myself  that  such  absence  or  unconsciousness 
was  entirely  real.  He  never  spoke  deprecatingly  of  any  nation- 
ality or  class  of  men,  or  time  in  the  world's  history,  or  against 
any  trades  or  occupations — not  even  against  any  animals,  in- 
sects, or  inanimate  things,  nor  any  of  the  laws  of  nature,  nor  any 
of  the  results  of  those  laws,  such  as  illness,  deformity,  and 
death.  He  never  complained  or  grumbled  either  at  the  weather, 
pain,  illness,  or  anything  else.  He  never  swore.  He  could  not 
very  well,  since  he  never  spoke  in  anger  and  apparently  never 


84       THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

was  angry.  He  never  exhibited  fear,  and  I  do  not  believe  he 
ever  felt  it."^ 

Walt  Whitman  owes  his  importance  in  literature  to  the 
systematic  expulsion  from  his  writings  of  all  contractile  ele- 
ments. The  only  sentiments  he  allowed  himself  to  express 
were  of  the  expansive  order;  and  he  expressed  these  in  the 
first  person,  not  as  your  mere  monstrously  conceited  indi- 
vidual might  so  express  them,  but  vicariously  for  all  men,  so 
that  a  passionate  and  mystic  ontological  emotion  suffuses  his 
words,  and  ends  by  persuading  the  reader  that  men  and 
women,  life  and  death,  and  all  things  are  divinely  good. 

Thus  it  has  come  about  that  many  persons  to-day  regard 
Walt  Whitman  as  the  restorer  of  the  eternal  natural  religion. 
He  has  infected  them  with  his  own  love  of  comrades,  with 
his  own  gladness  that  he  and  they  exist.  Societies  are  actual- 
ly formed  for  his  cult;  a  periodical  organ  exists  for  its  propa- 
gation, in  which  the  lines  of  orthodoxy  and  heterodoxy  are 
already  beginning  to  be  drawn  ;^  hymns  are  written  by  oth- 
ers in  his  peculiar  prosody;  and  he  is  even  explicitly  com- 
pared with  the  founder  of  the  Christian  religion,  not  alto- 
gether to  the  advantage  of  the  latter. 

Whitman  is  often  spoken  of  as  a  "pagan."  The  word  now- 
adays means  sometimes  the  mere  natural  animal  man  with- 
out a  sense  of  sin;  sometimes  it  means  a  Greek  or  Roman 
with  his  own  peculiar  religious  consciousness.  In  neither  of 
these  senses  does  it  fitly  define  this  poet.  He  is  more  than 
your  mere  animal  man  who  has  not  tasted  of  the  tree  of 
good  and  evil.  He  is  aware  enough  of  sin  for  a  swagger  to 
be  present  in  his  indifference  towards  it,  a  conscious  pride  in 
his  freedom  from  flexions  and  contractions,  which  your  gen- 
uine pagan  in  the  first  sense  of  the  word  would  never  show. 

^  R.  M.  Bucke:  Cosmic  Consciousness,  pp.  182-186,  abridged. 
-  I  refer  to  The  Conservator,  edited  by  Horace  Traubel,  and  pub- 
lished monthly  at  Philadelphia. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         85 

"I  could  turn  and  live  with  animals,  they  are  so  placid  and  self- 
contained, 

I  stand  and  look  at  them  long  and  long; 

They  do  not  sweat  and  whine  about  their  condition. 

They  do  not  lie  awake  in  the  dark  and  weep  for  their  sins. 

Not  one  is  dissatisfied,  not  one  is  demented  with  the  mania  of 
owning  things, 

Not  one  kneels  to  another,  nor  to  his  kind  that  lived  thousands 
of  years  ago. 

Not  one  is  respectable  or  unhappy  over  the  whole  earth."^ 

No  natural  pagan  could  have  written  these  well-known 
lines.  But  on  the  other  hand  Whitman  is  less  than  a  Greek 
or  Roman;  for  their  consciousness,  even  in  Homeric  times, 
was  full  to  the  brim  of  the  sad  mortality  of  this  sunlit  world, 
and  such  a  consciousness  Walt  Whitman  resolutely  refuses 
to  adopt.  When,  for  example,  Achilles,  about  to  slay  Lycaon, 
Priam's  young  son,  hears  him  sue  for  mercy,  he  stops  to 
say : — 

"Ah,  friend,  thou  too  must  die:  why  thus  lamentest  thou? 
Patroclos  too  is  dead,  who  was  better  far  than  thou.  .  .  .  Over 
me  too  hang  death  and  forceful  fate.  There  cometh  morn  or 
eve  or  some  noonday  when  my  life  too  some  man  shall  take 
in  battle,  whether  with  spear  he  smite,  or  arrow  from  the 
string."^ 

Then  Achilles  savagely  severs  the  poor  boy's  neck  with  his 
sword,  heaves  him  by  the  foot  into  the  Scamander,  and  calls 
to  the  fishes  of  the  river  to  eat  the  white  fat  of  Lycaon.  Just 
as  here  the  cruelty  and  the  sympathy  each  ring  true,  and  do 
not  mix  or  interfere  with  one  another,  so  did  the  Greeks  and 
Romans  keep  all  their  sadnesses  and  gladnesses  unmingled 
and  entire.  Instinctive  good  they  did  not  reckon  sin;  nor  had 
they  any  such  desire  to  save  the  credit  of  the  universe  as  to 

^  Song  of  Myself,  32. 

^  Iliad,  XXI.,  E.  Myers's  translation. 


86       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

make  them  insist,  as  so  many  of  us  insist,  that  what  imme- 
diately appears  as  evil  must  be  "good  in  the  making,"  or 
something  equally  ingenious.  Good  was  good,  and  bad  just 
bad,  for  the  earlier  Greeks.  They  neither  denied  the  ills  of 
nature— Walt  Whitman's  verse,  "What  is  called  good  is 
perfect  and  what  is  called  bad  is  just  as  perfect,"  would  have 
been  mere  silliness  to  them. — nor  did  they,  in  order  to  escape 
from  those  ills,  invent  "another  and  a  better  world"  of  the 
imagination,  in  which,  along  with  the  ills,  the  innocent 
goods  of  sense  would  also  find  no  place.  This  integrity  of 
the  instinctive  reactions,  this  freedom  from  all  moral  sophis- 
try and  strain,  gives  a  pathetic  dignity  to  ancient  pagan  feel- 
ing. And  this  quality  Whitman's  outpourings  have  not  got. 
His  optimism  is  too  voluntary  and  defiant;  his  gospel  has  a 
touch  of  bravado  and  an  affected  twist, ^  and  this  diminishes 
its  effect  on  many  readers  who  yet  are  well  disposed  towards 
optimism,  and  on  the  whole  quite  willing  to  admit  that  in 
important  respects  Whitman  is  of  the  genuine  lineage  of  the 
prophets. 

If,  then,  we  give  the  name  of  healthy-mindedness  to  the 
tendency  which  looks  on  all  things  and  sees  that  they  are 
good,  we  find  that  we  must  distinguish  between  a  more  in- 
voluntary and  a  more  voluntary  or  systematic  way  of  being 
healthy-minded.  In  its  involuntary  variety,  healthy-minded- 
ness is  a  way  of  feeling  happy  about  things  immediately.  In 
its  systematical  variety,  it  is  an  abstract  way  of  conceiving 
things  as  good.  Every  abstract  way  of  conceiving  things  se- 
lects some  one  aspect  of  them  as  their  essence  for  the  time 
being,  and  disregards  the  other  aspects.  Systematic  healthy- 
mindedness,  conceiving  gcx^d  as  the  essential  and  universal 

^  "God  is  afraid  of  me!"  remarked  such  a  titanic-optimistic  friend 
in  my  presence  one  morning  when  he  was  feeling  particularly 
hearty  and  cannibalistic.  The  defiance  of  the  phrase  showed  that  a 
Christian  education  in  humihty  still  rankled  in  his  breast. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         87 

aspect  of  being,  deliberately  excludes  evil  from  its  field  of 
vision;  and  although,  when  thus  nakedly  stated,  this  might 
seem  a  difficult  feat  to  perform  for  one  who  is  intellectually 
sincere  with  himself  and  honest  about  facts,  a  little  reflection 
shows  that  the  situation  is  too  complex  to  lie  open  to  so  sim- 
ple a  criticism. 

In  the  first  place,  happmess,  like  every  other  emotional 
state,  has  blindness  and  insensibility  to  opposing  facts  given 
it  as  its  instinctive  weapon  for  self-protection  against  distur- 
bance. When  happiness  is  actually  in  possession,  the  thought 
of  evil  can  no  more  acquire  the  feeling  of  reality  than  the 
thought  of  good  can  gain  reaUty  when  melancholy  rules.  To 
the  man  actively  happy,  from  whatever  cause,  evil  simply 
cannot  then  and  there  be  believed  in.  He  must  ignore  it;  and 
to  the  bystander  he  may  then  seem  perversely  to  shut  his 
eyes  to  it  and  hush  it  up. 

But  more  than  this:  the  hushing  of  it  up  may,  in  a  perfect- 
ly candid  and  honest  mind,  grow  into  a  deliberate  religious 
policy,  or  parti  pris.  Much  of  what  we  call  evil  is  due  entire- 
ly to  the  way  men  take  the  phenomenon.  It  can  so  often  be 
converted  into  a  bracing  and  tonic  good  by  a  simple  change 
of  the  sufEerer's  inner  attitude  from  one  of  fear  to  one  of 
fight;  its  sting  so  often  departs  and  turns  into  a  relish  when, 
after  vainly  seeking  to  shun  it,  we  agree  to  face  about  and 
bear  it  cheerfully,  that  a  man  is  simply  bound  in  honor,  with 
reference  to  many  of  the  facts  that  seem  at  first  to  disconcert 
his  peace,  to  adopt  this  way  of  escape.  Refuse  to  admit  their 
badness;  despise  their  power;  ignore  their  presence;  turn 
your  attention  the  other  way;  and  so  far  as  you  yourself  are 
concerned  at  any  rate,  though  the  facts  may  still  exist,  their 
evil  character  exists  no  longer.  Since  you  make  them  evil  or 
good  by  your  own  thoughts  about  them,  it  is  the  ruling  of 
your  thoughts  which  proves  to  be  your  principal  concern. 

The  deliberate  adoption  of  an  optimistic  turn  of  mind 
thus  makes  its  entrance  into  philosophy.  And  once  in,,  it  is 


88       THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hard  to  trace  its  lawful  bounds.  Not  only  does  the  human 
instinct  for  happiness,  bent  on  self-protection  by  ignoring, 
keep  working  in  its  favor,  but  higher  inner  ideals  have 
weighty  words  to  say.  The  attitude  of  unhappiness  is  not 
only  painful,  it  is  mean  and  ugly.  What  can  be  more  base 
and  unworthy  than  the  pining,  puling,  mumping  mood,  no 
matter  by  what  outward  ills  it  may  have  been  engendered? 
What  is  more  injurious  to  others?  What  less  helpful  as  a 
way  out  of  the  difficulty?  It  but  fastens  and  perpetuates  the 
trouble  which  occasioned  it,  and  increases  the  total  evil  of 
the  situation.  At  all  costs,  then,  we  ought  to  reduce  the  sway 
of  that  mood;  we  ought  to  scout  it  in  ourselves  and  others, 
and  never  show  it  tolerance.  But  it  is  impossible  to  carry  on 
this  discipline  in  the  subjective  sphere  without  zealously  em- 
phasizing the  brighter  and  minimizing  the  darker  aspects  of 
the  objective  sphere  of  things  at  the  same  time.  And  thus 
our  resolution  not  to  indulge  in  misery,  beginning  at  a  com- 
paratively small  point  within  ourselves,  may  not  stop  until 
it  has  brought  the  entire  frame  of  reality  under  a  systematic 
conception  optimistic  enough  to  be  congenial  with  its  needs. 
In  all  this  I  say  nothing  of  any  mystical  insight  or  persua- 
sion that  the  total  frame  of  things  absolutely  must  be  good. 
Such  mystical  persuasion  plays  an  enormous  part  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  religious  consciousness,  and  we  must  look  at  it 
later  with  some  care.  But  we  need  not  go  so  far  at  present. 
More  ordinary  non-mystical  conditions  of  rapture  suffice  for 
my  immediate  contention.  All  invasive  moral  states  and  pas- 
sionate enthusiasms  make  one  feelingless  to  evil  in  some  di- 
^■ection.  The  common  penalties  cease  to  deter  the  patriot,  the 
usual  prudences  are  flung  by  the  lover  to  the  winds.  When 
the  passion  is  extreme,  suffering  may  actually  be  gloried  in, 
provided  it  be  for  the  ideal  cause,  death  may  lose  its  sting, 
the  grave  its  victory.  In  these  states,  the  ordinary  contrast  of 
good  and  ill  seems  to  be  swallowed  up  in  a  higher  denomin- 
qtion,  an  omnipotent  excitement  which  engulfs  the  evil,  and 


THE   RELIGION    OF   HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS         89 

which  the  human  being  welcomes  as  the  crowning  experi- 
ence of  his  hfe.  This,  he  says,  is  truly  to  live,  and  I  exult  in 
the  heroic  opportunity  and  adventure. 

The  systematic  cultivation  of  healthy-mindedness  as  a  re- 
ligious attitude  is  therefore  consonant  with  important  cur- 
rents in  human  nature,  and  is  anything  but  absurd.  In  fact, 
we  all  do  cultivate  it  more  or  less,  even  when  our  professed 
theology  should  in  consistency  forbid  it.  We  divert  our  at- 
tention from  disease  and  death  as  much  as  we  can;  and  the 
slaughter-houses  and  indecencies  without  end  on  which  our 
life  is  founded  are  huddled  out  of  sight  and  never  men 
tioned,  so  that  the  world  we  recognize  officially  in  literature 
and  in  society  is  a  poetic  fiction  far  handsomer  and  cleaner 
and  better  than  the  world  that  really  is.^ 

The  advance  of  Hberalism,  so-called,  in  Christianity,  dur- 
ing the  past  fifty  years,  may  fairly  be  called  a  victory  of 
healthy-mindedness  within  the  church  over  the  morbidness 
with  which  the  old  hell-fire  theology  was  more  harmonious- 
ly related.  We  have  now  whole  congregations  whose  preach' 
ers,  far  from  magnifying  our  consciousness  of  sin,  seem  de- 
voted rather  to  making  little  of  it.  They  ignore,  or  even 
deny,  eternal  punishment,  and  insist  on  the  dignity  rather 
than  on  the  depravity  of  man.  They  look  at  the  continual 
preoccupation  of  the  old-fashioned  Christian  with  the  salva- 
tion of  his  soul  as  something  sickly  and  reprehensible  rather 
than  admirable;  and  a  sanguine  and  "muscular"  attitude, 
which  to  our  forefathers  would  have  seemed  purely  heathen, 
has  become  in  their  eyes  an  ideal  element  of  Christian  char- 
acter. I  am  not  asking  whether  or  not  they  are  right,  I  am 
only  pointing  out  the  change. 

^  "As  I.  go  on  in  this  life,  day  by  day,  I  become  more  of  a  be- 
wildered child;  I  cannot  get  used  to  this  world,  to  procreation,  to 
heredity,  to  sight,  to  hearing;  the  commonest  things  are  a  burthen. 
The  prim,  obliterated,  polite  surface  of  life,  and  the  broad,  bawdy, 
and  orgiastic — or  msnadic — foundations,  form  a  spectacle  to  which 
no  habit  reconciles  me."  R.  L.  Stevenson:  Letters,  ii.  355. 


90       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

The  persons  to  whom  I  refer  have  still  retained  for  the 
most  part  their  nominal  connection  with  Christianity,  in 
spite  of  their  discarding  of  its  more  pessimistic  theological 
elements.  But  in  that  "theory  of  evolution"  which,  gather- 
ing momentum  for  a  century,  has  within  the  past  twenty- 
five  years  swept  so  rapidly  over  Europe  and  America,  we 
see  the  ground  laid  for  a  new  sort  of  religion  of  Nature, 
which  has  entirely  displaced  Christianity  from  the  thought 
of  a  large  part  of  our  generation.  The  idea  of  a  universal 
evolution  lends  itself  to  a  doctrine  of  general  meliorism  and 
progress  which  fits  the  religious  needs  of  the  healthy-mind- 
ed so  well  that  it  seems  almost  as  if  it  might  have  been 
created  for  their  use.  Accordingly  we  find  "evolutionism" 
interpreted  thus  optimistically  and  embraced  as  a  substitute 
for  the  religion  they  were  born  in,  by  a  multitude  of  our 
contemporaries  who  have  either  been  trained  scientifically, 
or  been  fond  of  reading  popular  science,  and  who  had  al- 
ready begun  to  be  inwardly  dissatisfied  with  what  seemed 
to  them  the  harshness  and  irrationality  of  the  orthodox 
Christian  schem^e.  As  examples  are  better  than  descriptions, 
I  will  quote  a  document  received  in  answer  to  Professor 
Starbuck's  circular  of  questions.  The  writer's  state  of  mind 
may  by  courtesy  be  called  a  religion,  for  it  is  his  reaction 
on  the  whole  nature  of  things,  it  is  systematic  and  reflective, 
and  it  loyally  binds  him  to  certain  inner  ideals.  I  think  you 
will  recognize  in  him,  coarse-meated  and  incapable  of 
wounded  spirit  as  he  is,  a  sufficiently  familiar  contemporary 
fype. 

Q.  What  does  Religion  mean  to  you? 

A.  It  means  nothing;  and  it  seems,  so  far  as  I  can  observe, 
useless  to  others.  I  am  sixty-seven  years  of  age  and  have  resided 
in  X.  fifty  years,  and  have  been  in  business  forty-five,  conse- 
quently I  have  some  little  experience  of  life  and  men,  and 
some  women  too,  and  I  find  that  the  most  religious  and  pious 
people  are  as  a  rule  those  most  lacking  in  uprightness  and  mo- 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         9I 

rality.  The  men  who  do  not  go  to  church  or  have  any  rehgious 
convictions  are  the  best.  Praying,  singing  of  hymns,  and  ser- 
monizing are  pernicious — they  teach  us  to  rely  on  some  super- 
natural power,  when  we  ought  to  rely  on  ourselves.  I  ^(fftotaliy 
disbelieve  in  a  God.  The  God-idea  was  begotten  in  ignorance, 
fear,  and  a  general  lack  of  any  knowledge  of  Nature.  If  I  were 
to  die  now,  being  in  a  healthy  condition  for  my  age,  both  men- 
tally and  physically,  I  v/ould  just  as  lief,  yes,  rather,  die  with  a 
hearty  enjoyment  of  music,  sport,  or  any  other  rational  pastime. 
As  a  timepiece  stops,  we  die — there  being  no  immortality  in 
either  case. 

Q.  What  comes  before  your  mind  corresponding  to  the  words 
God,  Heaven,  Angels,  etc? 

A.  Nothing  whatever.  I  am  a  man  without  a  religion.  These 
words  mean  so  much  mythic  bosh. 

Q.  Have  you  had  any  experiences  which  appeared  provi- 
dential? 

A.  None  whatever.  There  is  no  agency  of  the  superintend- 
ing kind.  A  little  judicious  observation  as  well  as  knowledge 
of  scientific  law  will  convince  any  one  of  this  fact. 

Q.  What  things  wor\  most  strongly  on  your  emotions? 

A.  Lively  songs  and  music;  Pinafore  instead  of  an  Oratorio 
I  like  Scott,  Burns,  Byron,  Longfellow,  especially  Shakespeare, 
etc.,  etc.  Of  songs,  the  Star-Spangled  Banner,  America,  Marseil- 
laise, and  all  moral  and  soul-stirring  songs,  but  wishy-washy 
hymns  are  my  detestation.  I  greatly  enjoy  nature,  especially 
fine  weather,  and  until  within  a  few  years  used  to  walk  Sun- 
days into  the  country,  twelve  miles  often,  with  no  fatigue,  and 
bicycle  forty  or  fifty.  I  have  dropped  the  bicycle.  I  never  go  to 
church,  but  attend  lectures  when  there  are  any  good  ones.  All  of 
my  thoughts  and  cogitations  have  been  of  a  healthy  and  cheerful 
kind,  for  instead  of  doubts  and  fears  I  see  things  as  they  are, 
for  I  endeavor  to  adjust  myself  to  my  environment.  This  I  re- 
gard as  the  deepest  law.  Mankind  is  a  progressive  animal.  I  am 
satisfied  he  will  have  made  a  great  advance  over  his  present 
status  a  thousand  years  hence. 

Q.  What  is  your  notion  of  sin? 

A.  It  seems  to  me  that  sin  is  a  condition,  a  disease,  inciden- 
tal to  man's  development  not  being  yet  advanced  enough.  Mor- 


92       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

bidness  over  it  increases  the  disease.  We  should  think  that  a 
miUion  of  years  hence  equity,  justice,  and  mental  and  physical 
good  order  will  be  so  fixed  and  organized  that  no  one  will  have 
any  idea  of  evil  or  sin. 

Q.   What  is  your  temperament? 

A.  Nervous,  active,  wide-awake,  mentally  and  physically. 
Sorry  that  Nature  compels  us  to  sleep  at  all 

If  we  arc  in  search  of  a  broken  and  a  contrite  heart,  clear- 
ly we  need  not  look  to  this  brother.  His  contentment  with 
the  finite  incases  him  like  a  lobster-shell  and  shields  him 
from  all  morbid  repining  at  his  distance  from  the  infinite. 
We  have  in  him  an  excellent  example  of  the  optimism 
which  may  be  encouraged  by  popular  science. 

To  my  mind  a  current  far  more  important  and  interest- 
ing religiously  than  that  which  sets  in  from  natural  science 
towards  heakhy-mindedness  is  that  which  has  recently 
poured  over  America  and  seems  to  be  gathering  force  every 
day — I  am  ignorant  what  foothold  it  may  yet  have  acquired 
in  Great  Britain — and  to  which,  for  the  sake  of  having  a 
brief  designation,  I  will  give  the  title  of  the  "Mind-cure 
movement."  There  are  various  sects  of  this  "New  Thought," 
to  use  another  of  the  names  by  which  it  calls  itself;  but 
their  agreements  are  so  profound  that  their  differences  may 
be  neglected  for  my  present  purpose,  and  I  will  treat  the 
movement,  without  apology,  as  if  it  were  a  simple  thing. 

It  is  a  deliberately  optimistic  scheme  of  life,  with  both  a 
speculative  and  a  practical  side.  In  its  gradual  development 
during  the  last  quarter  of  a  century,  it  has  taken  up  into 
itself  a  number  of  contributory  elements,  and  it  must  now 
be  reckoned  with  as  a  genuine  religious  power.  It  has  reach- 
ed the  stage,  for  example,  when  the  demand  for  its  litera- 
ture is  great  enough  for  insincere  stufT,  mechanically  pro- 
duced for  the  market,  to  be  to  a  certain  extent  supplied  by 
publishers— a  phenomenon  never  observed,  I  imagine,  until 
I  religion  has  got  well  past  its  earliest  insecure  beginnings. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         93 

One  of  the  doctrinal  sources  of  Mind-cure  is  the  foui 
Gospels;  another  is  Emersonianism  or  New  England  tran' 
scendentalism;  another  is  Berkeleyan  idealism;  another  is 
spiritism,  with  its  messages  of  "law"  and  "progress"  and 
"development";  another  the  optimistic  popular  science  eva 
lutionism  of  which  I  have  recently  spoken;  and,  finally, 
Hinduism  has  contributed  a  strain.  But  the  most  character- 
istic  feature  of  the  mind-cure  movement  is  an  inspiratior^ 
much  more  direct.  The  leaders  in  this  faith  have  had  an 
intuitive  belief  in  the  all-saving  power  of  healthy-minded 
attitudes  as  such,  in  the  conquering  efficacy  of  courage, 
hope,  and  trust,  and  a  correlative  contempt  for  doubt,  fear, 
worry,  and  all  nervously  precautionary  states  of  mind.' 
Their  belief  has  in  a  general  way  been  corroborated  by  the 
practical  experience  of  their  disciples;  and  this  experience 
forms  to-day  a  mass  imposing  in  amount. 

The  blind  have  been  made  to  see,  the  halt  to  walk;  life- 
long invalids  have  had  their  health  restored.  The  moral 
fruits  have  been  no  less  remarkable.  The  deliberate  adop- 
tion of  a  healthy-minded  attitude  has  proved  possible  to 
many  who  never  supposed  they  had  it  in  them;  regenera- 
tion of  character  has  gone  on  on  an  extensive  scale;  and 
cheerfulness  has  been  restored  to  countless  homes.  The  in- 
direct influence  of  this  has  been  great.  The  mind-cure  prin- 
ciples are  beginning  so  to  pervade  the  air  that  one  catches 
their  spirit  at  second-hand.  One  hears  of  the  "Gospel  of 
Relaxation,"  of  the  "Don't  Worry  Movement,"  of  people 
who  repeat  to  themselves,  "Youth,  health,  vigor!"  when 
dressing  in  the  morning,  as  their  motto  for  the  day.  Com- 

1  "Cautionary  Verses  for  Children":  this  title  of  a  much  used 
work,  published  early  in  the  nineteenth  century,  shows  how  far  the 
muse  of  evangelical  protestantism  in  England,  with  her  mind  fixed 
on  the  idea  of  danger,  had  at  last  drifted  away  from  the  original 
gospel  freedom.  Mind-cure  might  be  briefly  called  a  reacdon  against 
all  that  religion  of  chronic  anxiety  which  marked  the  earlier  pari 
of  our  century  in  the  evangelical  circles  of  England  and  America. 


94      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

plaints  of  the  weather  are  getting  to  be  forbidden  in  many 
households;  and  more  and  more  people  are  recognizing  it 
to  be  bad  form  to  speak  of  disagreeable  sensations,  or  to 
make  much  of  the  ordinary  inconveniences  and  ailments  of 
hfe.  These  general  tonic  effects  on  public  opinion  would  be 
good  even  if  the  more  striking  results  were  non-existent. 
But  the  latter  abound  so  that  we  can  afford  to  overlook  the 
innumerable  failures  and  self-deceptions  that  are  mixed  in 
with  them  (for  in  everything  human  failure  is  a  matter  of 
course),  and  we  can  also  overlook  the  verbiage  of  a  good 
deal  of  the  mind-cure  literature,  some  of  which  is  so  moon- 
struck with  optimism  and  so  vaguely  expressed  that  an 
academically  trained  intellect  finds  it  almost  impossible  to 
read  it  at  all. 

The  plain  fact  remains  that  the  spread  of  the  movement 
has  been  due  to  practical  fruits,  and  the  extremely  practical 
turn  of  character  of  the  American  people  has  never  been 
better  shown  than  by  the  fact  that  this,  their  only  decidedly 
original  contribution  to  the  systematic  philosophy  of  life, 
should  be  so  intim.ately  knit  up  with  concrete  therapeutics. 
To  the  importance  of  mind-cure  the  medical  and  clerical 
professions  in  the  United  States  are  beginning,  though  with 
much  recalcitrancy  and  protesting,  to  open  their  eyes.  It  is 
evidently  bound  to  develop  still  farther,  both  speculatively 
and  practically,  and  its  latest  writers  are  far  and  away  the 
ablest  of  the  group.-^  It  matters  nothing  that,  just  as  there 
are  hosts  of  persons  who  cannot  pray,  so  there  are  greater 
hosts  who  cannot  by  any  possibility  be  influenced  by  the 
mind-curcrs'  ideas.  For  our  immediate  purpose,  the  impor- 
tant point  is  that  so  large  a  number  should  exist  who  can 

^  I  refer  to  Mr.  Horatio  W.  Dresser  and  Mr.  Henry  Wood,  espe- 
cially the  former.  Mr.  Dresser's  works  are  published  by  G.  P.  Put- 
nam's Sons,  New  York  and  London;  Mr.  Wood's  by  Lee  &  Shepard, 
Boston. 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         95 

be  so  influenced.  They  form  a  psychic  type  to  be  studied 
with  respect." 

2  Lest  my  own  testimonj'  be  suspected,  I  will  quote  another  re- 
porter, Dr.  H.  H.  Goddard,  of  Clark  University,  whose  thesis  on 
"die  Effects  of  Mind  on  Body  as  evidenced  by  Faith  Cures"  is  pub- 
lished in  the  American  Journal  of  Psychology  for  1899  (vol.  x.). 
This  cridc,  after  a  wide  study  of  the  facts,  concludes  that  the  cures 
by  mind-cure  exist,  but  are  in  no  respect  different  from  those  now 
officially  recognized  in  medicine  as  cures  by  suggestion;  and  die  end 
of  his  essay  contains  an  inter esdng  physiological  speculation  as  to 
the  way  in  which  the  suggestive  ideas  may  work  (p.  67  of  the  re- 
print). As  regards  the  general  phenomenon  of  mental  cure  itself, 
Dr.  Goddard  writes:  "In  spite  of  the  severe  criticism  we  have  made 
of  reports  of  cure,  there  still  remains  a  vast  amount  of  material, 
showing  a  powerful  influence  of  the  mind  in  disease.  Many  caseT 
are  of  diseases  that  liave  been  diagnosed  and  ti'eated  by  the  best 
physicians  of  the  country,  or  which  prominent  hospitals  have  tried 
their  hand  at  curing,  but  without  success.  People  of  culture  and  edu' 
cation  have  been  treated  by  this  method  with  satisfactory  results. 
Diseases  of  long  standing  have  been  amehorated,  and  even  cured. 
,  .  .  We  have  ti-aced  the  mental  clement  through  primitive  medi> 
cine  and  folk-medicine  of  to-day,  patent  medicine,  and  witchcraft 
We  are  convinced  that  it  is  impossible  to  account  for  the  existence 
of  these  practices,  if  they  did  not  cure  disease,  and  that  if  they  cured 
disease,  it  must  have  been  the  mental  element  that  was  effective.  The 
same  argument  applies  to  those  modern  schools  of  mental  thera- 
peutics— Divine  Healing  and  Christian  Science.  It  is  hardly  conceiv- 
able that  the  large  body  of  intelligent  people  who  comprise  the 
body  known  distinctively  as  Mental  Scientists  should  continue  to 
exist  if  the  whole  thing  were  a  delusion.  It  is  not  a  thing  of  a  day; 
it  is  not  confined  to  a  few;  it  is  not  local.  It  is  true  that  many  fail 
urcs  are  recorded,  but  that  only  adds  to  the  argument.  There  must 
be  many  and  striking  successes  to  counterbalance  the  failures,  other^ 
wise  the  failures  would  have  ended  the  delusion.  .  .  .  Christian 
Science,  Divine  Healing,  or  Mental  Science  do  not,  and  never  ca^i 
in  the  very  namre  of  things,  cure  all  diseases;  nevertheless,  the  prac- 
tical applications  of  the  general  principles  of  the  broadest  mental 
science  will  tend  to  prevent  disease.  .  .  .  We  do  find  sufficient  evi- 
dence to  convince  us  that  the  proper  reform  in  mental  attimde 
would  reheve  many  a  sufferer  of  ills  that  the  ordinary  physician 
cannot  touch;  would  even  delay  the  approach  of  death  to  many  a 


96       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

To  come  now  to  a  little  closer  quarters  with  their  creed. 
The  fundamental  pillar  on  which  it  rests  is  nothing  more 
than  the  general  basis  of  all  religious  experience,  the  fact 
that  man  has  a  dual  nature,  and  is  connected  with  two 
spheres  of  thought,  a  shallower  and  a  profounder  sphere, 
in  either  of  which  he  may  learn  to  live  more  habitually. 
The  shallower  and  lower  sphere  is  that  of  the  fleshly  sensa- 
tions, instincts,  and  desires,  of  egotism,  doubt,  and  the  lower 
personal  interests.  But  whereas  Christian  theology  has  al- 
ways considered  jrowardness  to  be  the  essential  vice  of  this 
part  of  human  nature,  the  mind-curers  say  that  the  mark  of 
the  beast  in  it  is  fear;  and  this  is  what  gives  such  an  entirely 
new  religious  turn  to  their  persuasion. 

"Fear,"  to  quote  a  writer  of  the  school,  "has  had  its  uses  in 
the  evolutionary  process,  and  seems  to  constitute  the  whole  of 
forethought  in  most  animals;  but  that  it  should  remain  any 
part  of  the  mental  equipment  of  human  civilized  life  is  an 
absurdity.  I  find  that  the  fear  element  of  forethought  is  not 
stimulating  to  those  more  civilized  persons  to  whom  duty  and 
attraction  are  the  natural  motives,  but  is  weakening  and  deter- 
rent. As  soon  as  it  becomes  unnecessary,  fear  becomes  a  posi- 
tive deterrent,  and  should  be  entirely  removed,  as  dead  flesh  is 
removed  from  living  tissue.  To  assist  in  the  analysis  of  fear, 
and  in  the  denunciation  of  its  expressions,  I  have  coined  the 
word  jearthought  to  stand  for  the  unprofitable  element  of  fore- 
thought, and  have  defined  the  word  'worry'  as  jearthought  in 
contradistinction  to  forethought.  I  have  also  defined  fearthought 
as  the  self-imposed  or  self-permitted  suggestion  of  inferiority, 
in  order  to  place  it  where  it  really  belongs,  in  the  category  of 
harmful,  unnnecessary,  and  therefore  not  respectable  things."-^ 

victim  beyond  the  power  of  absolute  cure,  and  the  faithful  adher- 
ence to  a  truer  philosophy  of  life  will  keep  many  a  man  well,  and 
give  the  doctor  time  to  devote  to  allevia-ting  ills  that  are  unprevent- 
able"   (pp.  33,  34  of  reprint). 

^  Horace  Fletcher:  Happiness  as  found  in  Forethought  minus 
Fearthought,  Menticulture  Series,  ii.  Chicago  and  New  York,  Stone, 
i897,  PP-  21-25,  abridged. 


THE  RELIGION   OF   HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS        g') 

The  "misery-habit,"  the  "martyr-habit,"  engendered  by 
the  prevalent  "fearthought,"  get  pungent  criticism  from  the 
mind-cure  writers: — 

"Consider  for  a  moment  the  habits  of  life  into  which  we  are 
born.  There  are  certain  social  conventions  or  customs  and  al- 
leged requirements,  there  is  a  theological  bias,  a  general  view 
of  the  world.  There  are  conservative  ideas  in  regard  to  our 
early  training,  our  education,  marriage,  and  occupation  in  life. 
Following  close  upon  this,  there  is  a  long  series  of  anticipations, 
namely,  that  we  shall  suffer  certain  children's  diseases,  diseases 
of  middle  life,  and  of  old  age;  the  thought  that  we  shall  grow 
old,  lose  our  faculties,  and  again  become  childlike;  while  crown- 
ing all  is  the  fear  of  death.  Then  there  is  a  long  line  of  particular 
fears  and  trouble-bearing  expectations,  such,  for  example,  as- 
ideas  associated  with  certain  articles  of  food,  the  dread  of  the 
east  wind,  the  terrors  of  hot  weather,  the  aches  and  pains  as- 
sociated with  cold  weather,  the  fear  of  catching  cold  if  one  sit: 
in  a  draught,  the  coming  of  hay-fever  upon  the  14th  of  August 
in  the  middle  of  the  day,  and  so  on  through  a  long  list  of  fears, 
dreads,  worriments,  anxieties,  anticipations,  expectations,  pes- 
simisms, morbidities,  and  the  whole  ghostly  train  of  fateful 
shapes  which  our  fellow-men,  and  especially  physicians,  are 
ready  to  help  us  conjure  up,  an  array  worthy  to  rank  with  Brad- 
ley's 'unearthly  ballet  of  bloodless  categories.' 

"Yet  this  is  not  all.  This  vast  array  is  swelled  by  innumer- 
able volunteers  from  daily  life — the  fear  of  accident,  the  pos- 
sibility of  calamity,  the  loss  of  property,  the  chance  of  robbery, 
of  fire,  or  the  outbreak  of  war.  And  it  is  not  deemed  sufficient 
to  fear  for  ourselves.  When  a  friend  is  taken  ill,  we  must  forth- 
with fear  the  worst  and  apprehend  death.  If  one  meets  with 
sorrow  .  .  .  sympathy  means  to  enter  into  and  increase  the 
suffering. "-"^ 

"Man,"  to  quote  another  writer,  "often  has  fear  stamped 
upon  him  before  his  entrance  into  the  outer  world;  he  is  reared 
in  fear;  all  his  life  is  passed  in  bondage  to  fear  of  disease  and 
death,  and  thus  his  whole  mentality  becomes  cramped,  limited 

^H.  W.  Dresser:  Voices  of  Freedom,  New  York,  1899,  p.  38. 


gS       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

and  depressed,  and  his  body  follows  its  shrunken  pattern  and 
specification.  .  .  .  Think  of  the  millions  of  sensitive  and  re- 
sponsive souls  among  our  ancestors  who  have  been  under  the 
dominion  of  such  a  perpetual  nightmare!  Is  it  not  surprising 
that  health  exists  at  all?  Nothing  but  the  boundless  divine  love, 
exuberance,  and  vitality,  constantly  poured  in,  even  though 
imconsciously  to  us,  could  in  some  degree  neutralize  such  an 
ocean  of  morbidity."  ^ 

Although  the  disciples  of  the  mind-cure  often  use  Chris- 
nan  terminology,  one  sees  from  such  quotations  how  widely 
I  heir  notion  of  the  fall  of  man  diverges  from  that  of  ordi- 
Aary  Christians."^ 

Their  notion  of  man's  higher  nature  is  hardly  less  diver- 
gent, being  decidedly  pantheistic.  The  spiritual  in  man  ap- 

1  Henry  Wood:  Ideal  Suggestion  tlirough  Mental  Photography, 
Boston,  1899,  p.  54. 

-  Whether  k  differs  so  much  from  Christ's  own  notion  is  for  die 
exegetists  to  decide.  According  to  Harnack,  Jesus  felt  about  evil  and 
disease  much  as  our  mind-curers  do.  "What  is  the  answer  which 
Jesus  sends  to  John  the  Baptist?"  asks  Harnack,  and  says  it  is  this: 
"'The  blind  see,  and  the  lame  walk,  the  lepers  are  cleansed,  and 
the  deaf  hear,  the  dead  rise  up,  and  the  gospel  is  preached  to  the 
poor.'  That  is  the  'coming  of  the  kingdom,'  or  rather  in  these  sav- 
ing works  the  kingdom  is  already  there.  By  the  overcoming  and 
removal  of  misery,  of  need,  of  sickness,  by  these  actual  effects  John 
is  to  see  that  the  new  time  has  arrived.  The  casting  out  of  devils  is 
only  a  part  of  tliis  work  of  redemption,  but  Jestis  points  to  that  as 
ihe  sense  and  seal  of  his  mission.  Thus  to  the  wretched,  sick,  and 
poor  did  he  address  himself,  but  not  as  a  moralist,  and  without  a 
trace  of  sendmentalism.  He  never  makes  groups  and  departments 
of  the  ills;  he  never  spends  dme  in  asking  whether  the  sick  one 
'deserves'  to  be  cured;  and  it  never  occurs  to  him  to  sympadiize 
with  the  pain  or  the  death.  He  nowhere  says  that  sickness  is  a 
beneficent  infliction,  and  that  evil  has  a  healthy  use.  No,  he  calls 
sickness  sickness  and  health  health.  All  evil,  all  wretchedness,  is  for 
him  something  dreadful;  it  is  of  the  great  kingdom  of  Satan;  but 
he  feels  the  power  of  the  Saviour  within  him.  He  knows  that  ad- 
vance is  possible  only  when  weakness  is  overcome,  when  sickness  is 
made  well."  Das  Wesen  des  Cliristenthums,  1900,  p.  39. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS         99 

pears  in  the  mind-cure  philosophy  as  partly  conscious,  but 
chiefly  subconscious;  and  through  the  subconscious  part  of 
it  we  are  already  one  with  the  Divine  without  any  miracle 
of  grace,  or  abrupt  creation  of  a  new  inner  man.  As  this 
view  is  variously  expressed  by  different  writers,  we  find  in 
it  traces  of  Christian  mysticism,  of  transcendental  idealism, 
of  vedantism,  and  of  the  modern  psychology  of  the  sublim- 
inal self.  A  quotation  or  two  will  put  us  at  the  central  point 
of  view: — 

"The  great  central  fact  of  the  universe  is  that  spirit  of  infi- 
nite life  and  power  that  is  back  of  all,  that  manifests  itself  in 
and  through  all.  This  spirit  of  infinite  life  and  power  that  is 
back  of  all  is  what  I  call  God.  I  care  not  what  term  you  may 
use,  be  it  Kindly  Light,  Providence,  the  Over-Soul,  Omnipo- 
tence, or  whatever  term  may  be  most  convenient,  so  long  as  we 
are  agreed  in  regard  to  the  great  central  fact  itself.  God  then 
fills  the  universe  alone,  so  that  all  is  from  Him  and  in  Him, 
and  there  is  nothing  that  is  outside.  He  is  the  life  of  our  life, 
our  very  life  itself.  We  are  partakers  of  the  life  of  God;  and 
though  we  differ  from  Him  in  that  we  are  individualized 
spirits,  while  He  is  the  Infinite  Spirit,  including  us,  as  well 
as  all  else  beside,  yet  in  essence  the  life  of  God  and  the  life  of 
man  are  identically  the  same,  and  so  are  one.  They  differ  not 
in  essence  or  quality;  they  differ  in  degree. 

"The  great  central  fact  in  human  life  is  the  coming  into  a 
conscious  vital  realization  of  our  oneness  with  this  Infinite  Life, 
and  the  opening  of  ourselves  fully  to  this  divine  inflow.  In  just 
the  degree  that  we  come  into  a  conscious  realization  of  our 
oneness  with  the  Infinite  Life,  and  open  ourselves  to  this  divine 
inflow,  do  we  actualize  in  ourselves  the  qualities  and  powers 
of  the  Infinite  Life,  do  we  make  ourselves  channels  through 
which  the  Infinite  Intelligence  and  Power  can  work.  In  just 
the  degree  in  which  you  realize  your  oneness  with  the  Infinite 
Spirit,  you  will  exchange  dis-ease  for  ease,  inharmony  for  har- 
mony, suffering  and  pain  for  abounding  health  and  strength. 
To  recognize  our  own  divinity,  and  our  intimate  relation  to  the 
Universal,  is  to  attach  the  belts  of  our  machinery  to  the  power- 


100       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

house  of  the  Universe.  One  need  remain  in  hell  no  longer  than 
one  chooses  to;  we  can  rise  to  any  heaven  we  ourselves  choose; 
and  when  we  choose  so  to  rise,  all  the  higher  powers  of  the 
Universe  combine  to  help  us  heavenward."^ 

Let  me  now  pass  from  these  abstracter  statements  to  some 
more  concrete  accounts  of  experience  with  the  mind-cure 
religion.  I  have  many  answers  from  correspondents— the 
only  difficulty  is  to  choose.  The  first  two  whom  I  shall  quote 
are  my  personal  friends.  One  of  them,  a  woman,  writing  as 
follows,  expresses  well  the  feeling  of  continuity  with  the  In- 
finite Power,  by  which  all  mind-cure  disciples  are  inspired. 

"The  first  underlying  cause  of  all  sickness,  weakness,  or  de- 
pression is  the  human  sense  of  separateness  from  that  Divine 
Energy  which  we  call  God.  The  soul  which  can  feel  and  affirm 
in  serene  but  jubilant  confidence,  as  did  the  Nazarene:  'I  and 
my  Father  are  one,'  has  no  further  need  of  healer,  or  of  healing. 
This  is  the  whole  truth  in  a  nutshell,  and  other  foundation  for 
wholeness  can  no  man  lay  than  this  fact  of  impregnable  divine 
union.  Disease  can  no  longer  attack  one  whose  feet  are  planted 
on  this  rock,  who  feels  hourly,  momently,  the  influx  of  the 
Deific  Breath.  If  one  with  Omnipotence,  how  can  weariness 
enter  the  consciousness,  how  illness  assail  that  indomitable 
spark  ? 

"This  possibility  of  annulling  forever  the  law  of  fatigue  has 
been  abundantly  proven  in  my  own  case;  for  my  earlier  life 
bears  a  record  of  many,  many  years  of  bedridden  invalidism, 
with  spine  and  lower  limbs  paralyzed.  My  thoughts  were  no 
more  impure  than  they  are  to-day,  although  my  belief  in  the 
necessity  of  illness  was  dense  and  unenlightened;  but  since  my 
resurrection  in  the  flesh,  I  have  worked  as  a  healer  unceasingly 
for  fourteen  years  without  a  vacation,  and  can  truthfully  assert 
that  I  have  never  known  a  moment  of  fatigue  or  pain,  although 
coming  in  touch  constantly  with  excessive  weakness,  illness,  and 
disease  of  all  kinds.  For  how  can  a  conscious  part  of  Deity  be 

^  R.  W.  Trine:  In  Tune  with  the  Infinite,  26th  thousand,  N.  Y., 
1899.  I  h?  vf  '_•  strung  scattered  passages  together. 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      lOI 

sick? — since  'Greater  is  he  that  is  with  us  than  all  that  can  strive 
against  us.'  " 

My  second  correspondent,  also  a  woman,  sends  me  the 
following  statement: — 

"Life  seemed  difficult  to  me  at  one  time.  I  was  always  break- 
ing down,  and  had  several  attacks  of  what  is  called  nervous 
prostration,  with  terrible  insomnia,  being  on  the  verge  of  insan- 
ity; besides  having  many  other  troubles,  especialy  of  the  diges- 
tive organs.  I  had  been  sent  away  from  home  in  charge  of  doc- 
tors, had  taken  all  the  narcotics,  stopped  all  work,  been  fed  up, 
and  in  fact  knew  all  the  doctors  within  reach.  But  I  never  re- 
covered permanently  till  this  New  Thought  took  possession  of 
me. 

"I  think  that  the  one  thing  which  impressed  me  most  was 
learning  the  fact  that  we  must  be  in  absolutely  constant  relation 
or  mental  touch  (this  word  is  to  me  very  expressive)  with  that 
essence  of  life  which  permeates  all  and  which  we  call  God. 
This  is  almost  unrecognizable  unless  we  live  it  into  ourselves 
actually,  that  is,  by  a  constant  turning  to  the  very  innermost, 
deepest  consciousness  of  our  real  selves  or  of  God  in  us,  for 
illumination  from  within,  just  as  we  turn  to  the  sun  for  light, 
warmth,  and  invigoration  without.  When  you  do  this  con- 
sciously, realizing  that  to  turn  inward  to  the  light  within  you 
is  to  live  in  the  presence  of  God  or  your  divine  self,  you  soon 
discover  the  unreality  of  the  objects  to  which  you  have  hitherto 
been  turning  and  which  have  engrossed  you  without. 

"I  hav€  come  to  disregard  the  meaning  of  this  attitude  foi 
bodily  health  as  such,  because  that  comes  of  itself,  as  an  inci- 
dental result,  and  cannot  be  found  by  any  special  mental  act  or 
desire  to  have  it,  beyond  that  general  attitude  of  mind  I  have 
referred  to  above.  That  which  we  usually  make  the  object  of 
life,  those  outer  things  we  are  all  so  wildly  seeking,  which  we 
so  often  live  and  die  for,  but  which  then  do  not  give  us  peace 
and  happiness,  they  should  all  come  of  themselves  as  accessory, 
and  as  the  mere  outcome  or  natural  result  of  a  far  higher  life 
sunk  deep  in  the  bosom  of  the  spirit.  This  life  is  the  real  seek- 
ing of  the  kingdom  of  God,  the  desire  for  his  supremacy  in  our 


102       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hearts,  so  that  all  else  comes  as  that  which  shall  be  'added  unto 
you' — as  quite  incidental  and  as  a  surprise  to  us,  perhaps;  and 
yet  it  is  the  proof  of  the  reality  of  the  perfect  poise  in  the  very 
centre  of  our  being. 

"When  I  say  that  we  commonly  make  the  object  of  our  life 
'hat  which  we  should  not  work  for  primarily,  I  mean  many 
jhings  which  the  world  considers  praiseworthy  and  excellent, 
■iuch  as  success  in  business,  fame  as  author  or  artist,  physician 
or  lawyer,  or  renown  in  philanthropic  undertakings.  Such 
ihings  should  be  results,  not  objects.  I  would  also  include  pleas- 
ares  of  many  kinds  which  seem  harmless  and  good  at  the  time, 
and  are  pursued  because  many  accept  them — I  mean  conven- 
tionalities, sociabilities,  and  fashions  in  their  various  develop- 
ment, these  being  mostly  approved  by  the  masses,  although  they 
may  be  unreal,  and  even  unhealthy  superfluities." 

Here  is  another  case,  more  concrete,  also  that  of  a  woman. 
I  read  you  these  cases  without  comment — they  express  so 
many  varieties  of  the  state  of  mind  we  are  studying. 

"I  had  been  a  sufferer  from  my  childhood  till  my  fortieth 
year.  [Details  of  ill-health  are  given  which  I  omit.]  I  had  been 
in  Vermont  several  months  hoping  for  good  from  the  change 
of  air,  but  steadily  growing  weaker,  when  one  day  during  the 
latter  part  of  October,  while  resting  in  the  afternoon,  I  suddenly 
heard  as  it  were  these  words:  'You  will  be  healed  and  do  a  work 
you  never  dreamed  of.'  These  words  were  impressed  upon  my 
mind  with  such  power  I  said  at  once  that  only  God  could  have 
put  them  there.  I  believed  them  in  spite  of  myself  and  of  my 
suffering  and  weakness,  which  continued  until  Christmas, 
when  I  returned  to  Boston.  Within  two  days  a  young  friend 
offered  to  take  me  to  a  mental  healer  (this  was  January  7, 
t88i).  The  healer  said:  'There  is  nothing  but  Mind;  we  are 
expressions  of  the  One  Mind;  body  is  only  a  mortal  belief;  as  a 
man  thinketh  so  is  he.'  I  could  not  accept  all  she  said,  but  I 
translated  all  that  was  there  for  me  in  this  way:  'There  is  noth- 
ing but  God;  I  am  created  by  Him,  and  am  absolutely  depend- 
ent upon  Him;  mind  is  given  me  to  use;  and  by  just  so  much 
of  it  as  I  will  put  upon  the  thought  of  right  action  in  body  I 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      IO3 

shall  be  lifted  out  of  bondage  to  my  ignorance  and  fear  and  past 
experience.'  That  day  I  commenced  accordingly  to  take  a  little 
of  every  food  provided  for  the  family,  constantly  saying  to  my- 
self: 'The  Power  that  created  the  stomach  must  take  care  of 
what  I  have  eaten.'  By  holding  these  suggestions  through  the 
evening  I  went  to  bed  and  fell  asleep,  saying:  'I  am  soul,  spirit, 
just  one  with  God's  Thought  of  me,'  and  slept  all  night  without 
waking,  for  the  first  time  in  several  years  [the  distress-turns  had 
usually  recurred  about  two  o'clock  in  the  night].  I  felt  the  next 
day  like  an  escaped  prisoner,  and  believed  I  had  found  the 
secret  that  would  in  time  give  me  perfect  health.  Within  ten 
days  I  was  able  to  eat  anything  provided  for  others,  and  after 
two  weeks  I  began  to  have  my  own  positive  mentai  suggestions 
of  Truth,  which  were  to  me  like  stepping-stones.  I  will  note 
a  few  of  them;  they  came  about  two  weeks  apart. 

"ist.    I  am  Soul,  therefore  it  is  well  with  me. 

"2d.  I  am  Soul,  therefore  I  am  well. 

"3d.  A  sort  of  inner  vision  of  myself  as  a  four-footed  beast 
with  a  protuberance  on  every  part  of  my  body  where  I  had 
suffering,  with  my  own  face,  begging  me  to  acknowledge  it  as 
myself.  I  resolutely  fixed  my  attention  on  being  well,  and  re- 
fused to  even  look  at  my  old  self  in  this  form. 

"4th.  Again  the  vision  of  the  beast  far  in  the  background, 
with  faint  voice.  Again  refusal  to  acknowledge. 

"5th.  Once  more  the  vision,  but  only  of  my  eyes  with  the 
longing  look;  and  again  the  refusal.  Then  came  the  conviction, 
the  inner  consciousness,  that  I  was  perfectly  well  and  always 
had  been,  for  I  was  Soul,  an  expression  of  God's  Perfect 
Thought.  That  was  to  me  the  perfect  and  completed  separation 
between  what  I  was  and  what  I  appeared  to  be.  I  succeeded  in 
never  losing  sight  after  this  of  my  real  being,  by  constantly  af- 
firming this  truth,  and  by  degrees  (though  it  took  me  two 
years  of  hard  work  to  get  there)  /  expressed  health  continuously 
throughout  my  whole  body. 

"In  my  subsequent  nineteen  years'  experience  I  have  never 
known  this  Truth  to  fail  when  I  applied  it,  though  in  my  igno 
ranee  I  have  often  failed  to  apply  it,  but  through  my  failures  \ 
have  learned  the  simplicity  and  trustfulness  of  the  little  child." 


104       '^^^   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

But  I  fear  that  I  risk  tiring  you  by  so  many  examples,  and 
1  must  lead  you  back  to  philosophic  generalities  again.  You 
see  already  by  such  records  of  experience  how  impossible  it 
is  not  to  class  mind-cure  as  primarily  a  religious  movement. 
Its  doctrine  of  the  oneness  of  our  life  with  God's  life  is  in 
fact  quite  indistinguishable  from  an  interpretation  of 
Christ's  message  which  in  these  very  GifTord  lectures  has 
been  defended  by  some  of  your  very  ablest  Scottish  re- 
ligious philosophers.^ 

But  philosophers  usually  profess  to  give  a  quasi-logical 
explanation  of  the  existence  of  evil,  whereas  of  the  general 
fact  of  evil  in  the  world,  the  existence  of  the  selfish,  suffer- 

1  The  Cairds,  for  example.  In  Edward  Cairo's  Glasgow  Lectures 
of  1890-92  passages  like  this  abound: — 

"The  declaration  made  in  the  beginning  of  the  ministry  of  Jesus 
that  'the  time  is  fulfilled,  and  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand,' 
passes  with  scarce  a  break  into  the  announcement  that  'the  kingdom 
of  God  is  among  you';  and  the  importance  of  this  announcement 
\s  asserted  to  be  such  that  it  makes,  so  to  speak,  a  difference  in  ]{ind 
aetween  the  greatest  saints  and  prophets  who  lived  under  the  previ- 
ous reign  of  division,  and  'the  least  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven.'  The 
highest  ideal  is  brought  close  to  men  and  declared  to  be  within  their 
reach,  they  are  called  on  to  be  'perfect  as  their  Father  in  heaven  is 
perfect.'  The  sense  of  alienadon  and  distance  from  God  which  had 
grown  upon  the  pious  in  Israel  iust  in  propordon  as  they  had 
learned  to  look  upon  Him  as  no  mere  nadonal  divinity,  but  as  a 
God  of  jusdce  who  would  punish  Israel  for  its  sin  as  certainly  as 
Edom  or  Moab,  is  declared  to  be  no  longer  in  place;  and  the  typi- 
cal form  of  Chrisdan  prayer  points  to  the  abolidon  of  the  contrast 
between  this  world  and  the  next  which  through  all  the  history  of 
the  Jews  had  continually  been  growing  wider:  'As  in  heaven,  so  on 
earth.'  The  sense  of  the  division  of  man  from  God,  as  a  finite  being 
from  the  Infinite,  as  weak  and  sinful  from  the  Omnipotent  Good- 
ness, is  not  indeed  lost;  but  it  can  no  longer  overpower  the  con- 
sciousness of  oneness.  The  terms  'Son'  and  'Father'  at  once  state  die 
opposition  and  mark  its  limit.  They  show  that  it  is  not  an  absolute 
opposition,  but  one  which  presupposes  an  indestructible  principle  of 
unity,  that  can  and  must  become  a  principle  of  reconciliation."  The 
Evolution  of  Religion,  ii.  pp.  146,  147. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      IO5 

ing,  timorous  finite  consciousness,  the  mind-curers,  so  far 
as  I  am  acquainted  with  them,  profess  to  give  no  specula- 
tive explanation.  Evil  is  empirically  there  for  them  as  it  is 
for  everybody,  but  the  practical  point  of  view  predominates, 
and  it  would  ill  agree  with  the  spirit  of  their  system  to 
spend  time  in  worrying  over  it  as  a  "mystery"  or  "problem," 
or  in  "laying  to  heart"  the  lesson  of  its  experience,  after  the 
manner  of  the  Evangelicals.  Don't  reason  about  it,  as  Dante 
says,  but  give  a  glance  and  pass  beyond!  It  is  Avidhya, 
ignorance!  something  merely  to  be  outgrown  and  left  be- 
hind, transcended  and  forgotten.  Christian  Science  so-called, 
the  sect  of  Mrs.  Eddy,  is  the  most  radical  branch  of  mind- 
cure  in  its  dealings  with  evil.  For  it  evil  is  simply  a  lie,  and 
any  one  who  mentions  it  is  a  liar.  The  optimistic  ideal  of 
duty  forbids  us  to  pay  it  the  compliment  even  of  explicit 
attention.  Of  course,  as  our  next  lectures  will  show  us,  this 
is  a  bad  speculative  omission,  but  it  is  intimately  linked  with 
the  practical  merits  of  the  system  we  are  examining.  Why 
regret  a  philosophy  of  evil,  a  mind-curer  would  ask  us,  if  I 
can  put  you  in  possession  of  a  life  of  good? 

After  all,  it  is  the  life  that  tells;  and  mind-cure  has  de- 
veloped a  living  system  of  mental  hygiene  which  may  well 
claim  to  have  thrown  all  previous  literature  of  the  Didteti\ 
der  Seele  into  the  shade.  This  system  is  wholly  and  exclu- 
sively compacted  of  optimism:  "Pessimism  leads  to  weak- 
ness. Optimism  leads  to  power."  "Thoughts  are  things,"  as 
one  of  the  most  vigorous  mind-cure  writers  prints  in  bold 
type  at  the  bottom  of  each  of  his  pages;  and  if  your  thoughts 
are  of  health,  youth,  vigor,  and  success,  before  you  know  it 
these  things  will  also  be  your  outward  portion.  No  one  can 
fail  of  the  regenerative  influence  of  optimistic  thinking,  per- 
tinaciously pursued.  Every  man  owns  indefeasibly  this  inlet 
to  the  divine.  Fear,  on  the  contrary,  and  all  the  contracted 
and  egoistic  modes  of  thought,  are  inlets  to  destruction. 
Most  mind-curers  here  bring  in  a  doctrine  that  thoughts  art- 


I06      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE  | 

"forces,"  and  that,  by  virtue  of  a  law  that  like  attracts  like,  | 
one  man's  thoughts  draw  to  themselves  as  allies  all  the 
thoughts  of  the  same  character  that  exist  the  world  over. 
Thus  one  gets,  by  one's  thinking,  reinforcements  from  else- 
where for  the  realization  of  one's  desires;  and  the  great 
point  in  the  conduct  of  life  is  to  get  the  heavenly  forces  on 
one's  side  by  opening  one's  own  mind  to  their  influx. 

On  the  whole,  one  is  struck  by  a  psychological  similarity 
between  the  mind-cure  movement  and  the  Lutheran  and 
Wesleyan  movements.  To  the  believer  in  moralism  and 
works,  with  his  anxious  query,  "What  shall  I  do  to  be  saved?" 
Luther  and  Wesley  replied:  "You  are  saved  now,  if  you 
would  but  believe  it."  And  the  mind-curers  come  with  pre- 
cisely similar  words  of  emancipation.  They  speak,  it  is  true, 
to  persons  for  whom  the  conception  of  salvation  has  lost  its 
ancient  theological  meaning,  but  who  labor  nevertheless  with 
the  same  eternal  human  difficulty.  Things  are  wrong  with 
them;  and  "What  shall  I  do  to  be  clear,  right,  sound,  whole, 
well?"  is  the  form  of  their  question.  And  the  answer  is:  "You 
are  well,  sound,  and  clear  already,  if  you  did  but  know  it." 
"The  whole  matter  may  be  summed  up  in  one  sentence,"  says 
one  of  the  authors  whom  I  have  already  quoted,  "God  is 
well,  and  so  are  you.  You  must  awaken  to  the  knowledge  of 
your  real  being." 

The  adequacy  of  their  message  to  the  mental  needs  of  a 
large  fraction  of  mankind  is  what  gave  force  to  those  earlier 
gospels.  Exactly  the  same  adequacy  holds  in  the  case  of  the 
mind-cure  message,  fcx)lish  as  it  may  sound  upon  its  surface; 
and  seeing  its  rapid  growth  in  influence,  and  its  therapeutic 
triumphs,  one  is  tempted  to  ask  whether  it  may  not  be  des- 
tined (probably  by  very  reason  of  the  crudity  and  extrava- 
gance of  many  of  its  manifestations  ^)  to  play  a  part  almost 

^  It  remains  to  be  seen  whether  the  school  of  Mr.  Dresser,  which 
assumes  more  and  more   the  form  of  mind-cure  experience  and 


THE   RELIGION    OF   HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       IO7 

as  great  in  the  evolution  o£  the  popular  religion  of  the  future 
as  did  those  earlier  movements  in  their  day. 

But  I  here  fear  that  I  may  begin  to  "jar  upon  the  nerves" 
of  some  of  the  members  of  this  academic  audience.  Such  con- 
temporary vagaries,  you  may  think,  should  hardly  take  so 
large  a  place  in  dignified  Gifford  lectures.  I  can  only  beseech 
you  to  have  patience.  The  whole  outcome  of  these  lectures 
will,  I  imagine,  be  the  emphasizing  to  your  mind  of  the 
enorm.ous  diversities  which  the  spiritual  lives  of  different 
men  exhibit.  Their  wants,  their  susceptibilities,  and  their 
capacities  all  vary  and  must  be  classed  under  different  heads. 
The  result  is  that  we  have  really  different  types  of  religious 
experience;  and,  seeking  in  these  lectures  closer  acquaintance 
with  the  healthy-minded  type,  we  must  take  it  where  we  find 
it  in  most  radical  form.  The  psychology  of  individual  types 
of  character  has  hardly  begun  even  to  be  sketched  as  yet — 
our  lectures  may  possibly  serve  as  a  crumb-like  contribution 
to  the  structure.  The  first  thing  to  bear  in  mind  (especially  if 
we  ourselves  belong  to  the  clerico-academic-scientific  type, 
the  officially  and  conventionally  "correct"  type,  "the  deadly 
respectable"  type,  for  which  to  ignore  others  is  a  besetting 
temptation)  is  that  nothing  can  be  more  stupid  than  to  bar 
out  phenomena  from  our  notice,  merely  because  we  are  iu' 
capable  of  taking  part  in  anything  like  them  ourselves. 

Now  the  history  of  Lutheran  salvation  by  faith,  of  meth- 
odistic  conversions,  and  of  what  I  call  the  mind-cure  move- 
ment seems  to  prove  the  existence  of  numerous  persons  in 
whom — at  any  rate  at  a  certain  stage  in  their  development 
— a  change  of  character  for  the  better,  so  far  from  being 
facilitated  by  the  rules  laid  down  by  official  moralists,  will 
take  place  all  the  more  successfully  if  those  rules  be  exactly 

academic  philosophy  mutually  impregnating  each  other,  will  score 
the  practical  triumphs  of  the  less  critical  and  rational  sects. 


(08       IHE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

reversed.  Official  moralists  advise  us  never  to  relax  our 
strenuousness.  "Be  vigilant,  day  and  night,"  they  adjure  us; 
"hold  your  passive  tendencies  in  check;  shrink  from  no 
effort;  keep  your  will  like  a  bow  always  bent."  But  the 
persons  I  speak  of  find  that  all  this  conscious  effort  leads 
\o  nothing  but  failure  and  vexation  in  their  hands,  and  only 
makes  them  twofold  more  the  children  of  hell  they  were 
before.  The  tense  and  voluntary  attitude  becomes  in  them 
an  impossible  fever  and  torment.  Their  machinery  refuses 
to  run  at  all  when  the  bearings  are  made  so  hot  and  the 
belts  so  tight. 

Under  these  circumstances  the  way  to  success,  as  vouched 
for  by  innumerable  authentic  personal  narrations,  is  by  an 
anti-moralisiic  method,  by  the  "surrender",  of  which  I  spoke 
in  my  second  lecture.  Passivity,  not  activity;  relaxation,  not 
intentness,  should  be  now  the  rule.  Give  up  the  feeling  of 
responsibility,  let  go  your  hold,  resign  the  care  of  your 
destiny  to  higher  powers,  be  genuinely  indifferent  as  to  what 
becomes  of  it  all,  and  you  will  find  not  only  that  you  gain 
a  perfect  inward  relief,  but  often  also,  in  addition,  the  par- 
ticular goods  you  sincerely  thought  you  were  renouncing. 
This  is  the  salvation  through  self-despair,  the  dying  to  be 
truly  born,  of  Lutheran  theology,  the  passage  into  nothing 
of  which  Jacob  Behmen  writes.  To  get  to  it,  a  critical  point 
must  usually  be  passed,  a  corner  turned  within  one.  Some- 
thing must  give  way,  a  native  hardness  must  break  down 
and  liquefy;  and  this  event  (as  we  shall  abundandy  see 
hereafter)  is  frequently  sudden  and  automatic,  and  leaves 
■on  the  Subject  an  impression  that  he  has  been  wrought  on 
by  an  external  power. 

Whatever  its  ultimate  significance  may  prove  to  be,  this 
is  certainly  one  fundamental  form  of  human  experience. 
Some  say  that  the  capacity  or  incapacity  for  it  is  what  di- 
vides the  religious  from  the  merely  moralistic  character. 
With  those  who  undergo  it  in  its  fullness,  no  criticism  avails 


THE   RELIGION   OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       IO9 

to  cast  doubt  on  its  reality.  They  hnow;  for  they  have  actu- 
ally jelt  the  higher  powers,  in  giving  up  the  tension  of  their 
personal  will. 

A  story  which  revivalist  preachers  often  tell  is  that  of  a 
man  who  found  himself  at  night  sHpping  down  the  side  of 
a  precipice.  At  last  he  caught  a  branch  which  stopped  his 
fall,  and  remained  clinging  to  it  in  misery  for  hours.  But 
finally  his  fingers  had  to  loose  their  hold,  and  with  a  des- 
pairing farewell  to  life,  he  let  himself  drop.  He  fell  just  six 
inches.  If  he  had  given  up  the  struggle  earlier,  his  agonal 
would  have  been  spared.  As  the  mother  earth  received  him, 
so,  the  preachers  tell  us,  will  the  everlasting  arms  receive 
us  if  we  confide  absolutely  in  them,  and  give  up  the  heredi^^ 
tary  habit  of  relying  on  our  personal  strength,  with  its  pre- 
cautions that  cannot  shelter  and  safeguards  that  never  save. 

The  mind-curers  have  given  the  widest  scope  to  this  sort 
of  experience.  They  have  demonstrated  that  a  form  of  re- 
generation  by  relaxing,  by  letting  go,  psychologically  indis- 
tinguishable from  fhe  Lutheran  justification  by  faith  and 
the  Wesleyan  acceptance  of  free  grace,  is  within  the  reach 
of  persons  who  have  no  conviction  of  sin  and  care  nothing 
for  the  Lutheran  theology.  It  is  but  giving  your  little  private 
convulsive  self  a  rest,  and  finding  that  a  greater  Self  is  there. 
The  results,  slow  or  sudden,  or  great  or  small,  of  the  com- 
bined optimism  and  expectancy,  the  regenerative  phenom- 
ena which  ensue  on  the  abandonment  of  effort,  remain 
firm  facts  of  human  nature,  no  matter  whether  we  adopt  a 
theistic,  a  pantheistic-idealistic,  or  a  medical-materialistic 
view  of  their  ultimate  causal  explanation.-^ 

^  The  theistic  explanation  is  by  divine  grace,  which  creates  a  new 
nature  within  one  the  moment  the  old  nature  is  sincerely  given  up. 
The  pantheistic  explanadon  (which  is  that  of  most  mind-curers) 
is  by  the  merging  of  the  narrower  private  self  into  the  wider  or 
greater  self,  the  spirit  of  the  universe  (which  is  your  own  "subcon. 
scious"  self),   the  moment  the  isoladng  barriers  of  mistrust  sx\i 


tlO       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

When  we  lake  up  the  phenomena  of  revivahstic  conver- 
sion, we  shall  learn  something  more  about  all  this.  Mean- 
while I  will  say  a  brief  word  about  the  mind-curer's  meth- 
ods. 

They  arc  of  course  largely  suggestive.  The  suggestive  in- 
fluence of  environment  plays  an  enormous  part  in  all  spiri- 
tual education.  But  the  word  "suggestion,"  having  acquired 
official  status,  is  unfortunately  already  beginning  to  play  in 
m.any  quarters  the  part  of  a  wet  blanket  upon  investigation, 
being  used  to  fend  ofl  all  inquiry  into  the  varying  suscepti- 
bilities of  individual  cases.  "Suggestion"  is  only  another 
name  for  the  power  of  ideas,  so  jar  as  they  prove  efficacious 
over  belief  and  conduct.  Ideas  efficacious  over  some  people 
prove  inefficacious  over  others.  Ideas  efficacious  at  some 
times  and  in  some  human  surroundings  are  not  so  at  other 
times  and  elsewhere.  The  ideas  of  Christian  churches  are 
not  efficacious  in  the  therapeutic  direction  to-day,  whatever 
they  may  have  been  in  earlier  centuries;  and  when  the 
whole  question  is  as  to  why  the  salt  has  lost  its  savor  here 
or  gained  it  there,  the  mere  blank  waving  of  the  word 
"suggestion"  as  if  it  were  a  banner  gives  no  light.  Dr.  God- 
dard,  whose  candid  psychological  essay  on  Faith  Cures 
ascribes  them  to  nothing  but  ordinary  suggestion,  concludes 
by  saying  that  "Religion  [and  by  this  he  seems  to  mean  our 
popular  Christianity]  has  in  it  all  there  is  in  mental  thera- 
peutics, and  has  it  in  its  best  form.  Living  up  to  [our  re- 
ligious] ideas  will  do  anything  for  us  that  can  be  done." 
A.nd  this  in  spite  of  the  actual  fact  that  the  popular  Chris- 
anxiety  are  removed.  The  medico-materialistic  explanation  is  that 
simpler  cerebral  processes  act  more  freely  where  they  are  left  to  act 
automatically  by  the  shunting-out  of  physiologically  (though  in  this 
instance  not  spiritually)  "higher"  ones  which,  seeking  to  regulate, 
only  succeed  in  inhibiting  results. — Whether  this  third  explanation 
might,  in  a  psycho-physical  account  of  the  universe,  be  combined 
with  either  of  the  others  may  be  left  an  open  question  here. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      III 

tianity  does  absolutely  nothing,  or  did  nothing  until  mind- 
cure  came  to  the  rescue."^ 

^  Within  the  churches  a  disposition  has  always  prevailed  to  regard 
sickness  as  a  visitation;  something  sent  by  God  for  our  good,  either 
as  chastisement,  as  warning,  or  as  opportunity  for  exercising  virtue, 
and,  in  tlie  Catholic  Church,  of  earning  "merit."  "Illness,"  says  a 
good  Catholic  writer  P.  Lejeune:  Introd.  a  la  Vie  Mystique,  1899, 
p.  218),  "is  the  most  excellent  corporeal  mortifications,  the  mortifi- 
cation which  one  has  not  one's  self  chosen,  which  is  imposed  di- 
rectly by  God,  and  is  the  direct  expression  of  his  will.  'If  other 
mortifications  are  of  silver,'  Mgr.  Gay  says,  'this  one  is  of  gold; 
since  although  it  comes  of  ourselves,  coming  as  it  does  of  original 
sin,  still  on  its  greater  side,  as  coming  (like  all  that  happens)  from 
the  providence  of  God,  it  is  of  divine  manufacture.  And  how  just 
are  its  blows!  And  how  efficacious  it  is!  ...  I  do  not  hesitate  to 
say  that  padence  in  a  long  illness  is  mortificadon's  very  masterpiece, 
and  consequently  the  triumph  of  mortified  souls.'  "  According  to  this 
view,  disease  should  in  any  case  be  submissively  accepted,  and  it 
might  under  certain  circumstances  even  be  blasphemous  to  wish  it 
away. 

Of  course  there  have  been  excepdons  to  this,  and  cures  by  special 
miracle  have  at  all  times  been  recognized  within  the  church's  pale, 
almost  all  the  great  saints  having  more  or  less  performed  them.  It 
was  one  of  the  heresies  of  Edward  Irving,  to  maintain  them  still  to 
be  possible.  An  extremely  pure  faculty  of  healing  after  confession 
and  conversion  on  the  patient's  part,  and  prayer  on  the  priest's,  was 
quite  spontaneously  developed  in  the  German  pastor,  Joh.  Christoph 
Blumhardt,  in  the  early  forties  and  exerted  during  nearly  thirty 
years.  Blumhardt's  Life  by  Ziindel  (5th  edition,  Zurich,  1887)  gives 
in  chapters  ix.,  x.,  xi.,  and  xvii.  a  pretty  full  account  of  his  healing 
activity,  which  he  invariably  ascribed  to  direct  divine  interposition. 
Blumhardt  was  a  singularly  pure,  simple,  and  non-fanatical  char- 
acter, and  in  this  part  of  his  work  followed  no  previous  model.  In 
Chicago  to-day  we  have  the  case  of  Dr.  J.  A.  Dowie,  a  Scottish 
Baptist  preacher,  whose  weekly  "Leaves  of  Healing"  were  in  the 
year  of  grace  1900  in  their  sixth  volume,  and  who,  although  he  de- 
nounces the  cures  wrought  in  other  sects  as  "diabolical  counterfeits" 
of  his  own  exclusively  "Divine  Healing,"  must  on  the  whole  be 
counted  into  the  mind-cure  movement.  In  mind-cure  circles  the 
fundamental  article  of  faith  is  that  disease  should  never  be  accepted. 
It  is  wholly  of  the  pit.  God  wants  us  to  be  absolutely  healthy,  and 
we  should  not  tolerate  ourselves  on  any  lower  terms. 


112       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

An  idea,  to  be  suggestive,  must  come  to  the  individual 
with  the  force  of  a  revelation.  The  mind-cure  with  its  gospel 
of  healthy-mindedness  has  come  as  a  revelation  to  many 
whose  hearts  the  church  Christianity  had  left  hardened.  It 
has  let  loose  their  springs  of  higher  life.  In  what  can  the 
originality  of  any  religious  movement  consist,  save  in  find- 
ing a  channel,  until  then  sealed  up,  through  which  those 
springs  may  be  set  free  in  some  group  of  human  beings? 

The  force  of  personal  faith,  enthusiasm,  and  example,  and 
above  all  the  force  of  novelty,  are  always  the  prime  sugges- 
tive agency  in  this  kind  of  success.  If  mind-cure  should 
ever  become  official,  respectable,  and  intrenched,  these  ele- 
ments of  suggestive  efficacy  will  be  lost.  In  its  acuter  stages 
every  religion  must  be  a  homeless  Arab  of  the  desert.  The 
church  knows  this  well  enough,  with  its  everlasting  inner 
struggle  of  the  acute  religion  of  the  few  against  the  chronic 
religion  of  the  many,  indurated  into  an  obstructiveness 
worse  than  that  which  irreligion  opposes  to  the  movings  of 
the  Spirit.  "We  may  pray,"  says  Jonathan  Edwards,  "con- 
cerning all  those  saints  that  are  not  lively  Christians,  that 
fhey  may  either  be  enlivened,  or  taken  away;  if  that  be  true 
•ihat  is  often  said  by  some  at  this  day,  that  these  cold  dead 
■saints  do  more  hurt  than  natural  men,  and  lead  more  souls 
to  hell,  and  that  it  would  be  well  for  mankind  if  they  were 
-all  dead."  ^ 

The  next  condition  of  success  is  the  apparent  existence. 
In  large  numbers,  of  minds  who  unite  healthy-mindedness 
with  readiness  for  regeneration  by  letting  go.  Protestantism 
has  been  too  pessimistic  as  regards  the  natural  man,  Cathol- 
icism has  been  too  legalistic  and  moralistic,  for  either  the 
one  or  the  other  to  appeal  in  any  generous  way  to  the  type 

^  Edwards,  from  whose  book  on  the  Revival  in  New  England  I 
quote  these  words,  dissuades  from  such  a  use  of  prayer,  but  it  is 
easy  to  see  that  he  enjoys  making  his  thrust  at  the  cold  dead  church 
members. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       II3 

of  character  formed  of  this  peculiar  mingling  of  elements. 
However  few  of  us  here  present  may  belong  to  such  a  type, 
it  is  now  evident  that  it  forms  a  specific  moral  combination, 
well  represented  in  the  world. 

Finally,  mind-cure  has  made  what  in  our  protestant  coun- 
tries is  an  unprecedentedly  great  use  of  the  subconscious 
life.  To  their  reasoned  advice  and  dogmatic  assertion,  its 
founders  have  added  systematic  exercise  in  passive  relaxa- 
tion, concentration,  and  meditation,  and  have  even  invoked 
something  like  hypnotic  practice.  I  quote  some  passages  at 
random : — 

"The  value,  the  potency  of  ideals  is  the  great  practical  truth 
on  which  the  New  Thought  most  strongly  insists — the  devel- 
opment namely  from  within  outward,  from  small  to  great.' 
Consequently  one's  thought  should  be  centred  on  the  ideal  out- 
come, even  though  this  trust  be  literally  like  a  step  in  the  dark.^ 
To  attain  the  ability  thus  effectively  to  direct  the  mind,  the 
New  Thought  advises  the  practice  of  concentration,  or  in  other 
words,  the  attainment  of  self-control.  One  is  to  learn  to  marshal 
the  tendencies  of  the  mind,  so  that  they  may  be  held  together 
as  a  unit  by  the  chosen  ideal.  To  this  end,  one  should  set  apart 
times  for  silent  meditation,  by  one's  self,  preferably  in  a  room 
where  the  surroundings  are  favorable  to  spiritual  thought.  In 
New  Thought  terms,  this  is  called  'entering  the  silence.'  "^ 

"The  time  will  come  when  in  the  busy  office  or  on  the  noisy 
street  you  can  enter  into  the  silence  by  simply  drawing  the 
mantle  of  your  own  thoughts  about  you  and  realizing  that  there 
and  everywhere  the  Spirit  of  Infinite  Life,  Love,  Wisdom,  Peace, 
Power,  and  Plenty  is  guiding,  keeping,  protecting,  leading  you. 
This  is  the  spirit  of  continual  prayer."*  One  of  the  most  intuitive 
men  we  ever  met  had  a  desk  at  a  city  office  where  several  other 
gentlemen  were  doing  business  constantly,  and  often  talking 

^  H.  W.  Dresser:  Voices  of  Freedom,  46. 

2  Dresser:  Living  by  the  Spirit,  58. 

^  Dresser:  Voices  of  Freedom,  33. 

^  Trine:  In  Tune  with  the  Infinite,  p.  214. 


114       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

loudly.  Entirely  undisturbed  by  the  many  various  sounds  about 
him,  this  self-centred  faithful  man  would,  in  any  moment  of 
perplexity,  draw  the  curtains  of  privacy  so  completely  about 
him  that  he  would  be  as  fully  inclosed  in  his  own  psychic  aura, 
and  thereby  as  effectually  removed  from  all  distractions,  as 
though  he  were  alone  in  some  primeval  wood.  Taking  his  dif- 
ficulty with  him  into  the  mystic  silence  in  the  form  of  a  direct 
question,  to  which  he  expected  a  certain  answer,  he  would  re- 
main utterly  passive  until  the  reply  came,  and  never  once 
through  many  years'  experience  did  he  find  himself  disap- 
pointed or  misled."^ 

Wherein,  I  should  like  to  know,  does  tliis  intrinsically 
differ  from  the  practice  of  "recollection"  which  plays  so  great 
a  part  in  Catholic  discipline.''  Otherwise  called  the  practice 
of  the  presence  of  God  (and  so  known  among  ourselves, 
as  for  instance  in  Jeremy  Taylor),  it  is  thus  defined  by  the 
eminent  teacher  Alvarez  de  Paz  in  his  work  on  Contempla- 
tion. 

"It  is  the  recollection  of  God,  the  thought  of  God,  which  in 
all  places  and  circumstances  makes  us  see  him  present,  lets  us 
commune  respectfully  and  lovingly  with  him,  and  fills  us  with 
desire  and  affection  for  him.  .  .  .  Would  you  escape  from 
every  ill?  Never  lose  this  recollection  of  God,  neither  in  pros- 
perity nor  in  adversity,  nor  on  any  occasion  whichsoever  it  be. 
Invoke  not,  to  excuse  yourself  from  this  duty,  either  the  diffi- 
culty or  the  importance  of  your  business,  for  you  can  always 
remember  that  God  sees  you,  that  you  are  under  his  eye.  If  a 
thousand  times  an  hour  you  forget  him,  reanimate  a  thousand 
times  the  recollection.  If  you  cannot  practice  this  exercise  con- 
tinuously, at  least  make  yourself  as  familiar  with  it  as  pos- 
sible; and,  like  unto  those  who  in  a  rigorous  winter  draw  near 
the  fire  as  often  as  they  can,  go  as  often  as  you  can  to  that  ardent 
fire  which  will  warm  your  soul."^ 

^  Trine:  p.  117. 

-  Quoted  by  Lejeune:  Introd.  a.  la  Vie  Mystique,  1899,  p,  66. 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       II5 

All  the  external  associations  of  the  Catholic  discipline  are 
of  course  unlike  anything  in  mind-cure  thought,  but  the 
purely  spiritual  part  of  the  exercise  is  identical  in  both  com- 
munions, and  in  both  communions  those  who  urge  it  write 
with  authority,  for  they  have  evidently  experienced  in  their 
own  persons  that  whereof  they  tell.  Compare  again  some 
mind-cure  utterances: — 

"High,  healthful,  pure  thinking  can  be  encouraged,  pro- 
moted, and  strengthened.  Its  current  can  be  turned  upon  grand 
ideals  until  it  forms  a  habit  and  wears  a  channel.  By  means  of 
such  discipline  the  mental  horizon  can  be  flooded  with  the 
sunshine  of  beauty,  wholeness,  and  harmony.  To  inaugurate 
pure  and  lofty  thinking  may  at  first  seem  difficult,  even  almost 
mechanical,  but  perseverance  will  at  length  render  it  easy,  then 
pleasant,  and  finally  delightful. 

"The  soul's  real  world  is  that  which  it  has  built  of  its 
thoughts,  mental  states,  and  imaginations.  If  we  will,  we  can 
turn  our  backs  upon  the  lower  and  sensuous  plane,  and  lift  our- 
selves into  the  realm  of  the  spiritual  and  Real,  and  there  gain 
a  residence.  The  assumption  of  states  of  expectancy  and  recep- 
tivity will  attract  spiritual  sunshine,  and  it  v/ill  flow  in  as  natur- 
ally as  air  inclines  to  a  vacuum.  .  .  .  Whenever  the  thought 
is  not  occupied  with  one's  daily  duty  or  profession,  it  should  be 
sent  aloft  into  the  spiritual  atmosphere.  There  are  quiet  leisure 
moments  by  day,  and  wakeful  hours  at  night,  when  this  whole- 
some and  delightful  exercise  may  be  engaged  in  to  great  ad- 
vantage. If  one  who  has  never  made  any  systematic  effort  to 
lift  and  control  the  thought-forces  will,  for  a  single  month, 
earnestly  pursue  the  course  here  suggested,  he  will  be  surprised 
and  delighted  at  the  result,  and  nothing  will  induce  him  to  go 
back  to  careless,  aimless,  and  superficial  thinking.  At  such 
favorable  seasons  the  outside  world,  with  all  its  current  of  daily 
events,  is  barred  out,  and  one  goes  into  the  silent  sanctuary  of 
the  inner  temple  of  soul  to  commune  and  aspire.  The  spiritual 
hearing  becomes  delicately  sensitive,  so  that  the  'still,  small 
voice'  is  audible,  the  tumultuous  waves  of  external  sense  are 


Il6      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hushed,  and  there  is  a  great  calm.  The  ego  gradually  becomes 
conscious  that  it  is  face  to  face  with  the  Divine  Presence;  that 
mighty,  healing,  loving,  Fatherly  life  which  is  nearer  to  us 
than  we  are  to  ourselves.  There  is  soul  contact  with  the  Parent- 
Soul,  and  an  influx  of  life,  love,  virtue,  health,  and  happiness 
from  the  Inexhaustible  Fountain."^ 

When  we  reach  the  subject  of  mysticism,  you  will  under- 
go so  deep  an  immersion  into  these  exalted  states  of  con- 
sciousness as  to  be  wet  all  over,  if  I  may  so  express  myself; 
and  the  cold  shiver  of  doubt  with  which  this  little  sprink- 
ling may  aflfect  you  will  have  long  since  passed  away — • 
doubt,  I  mean,  as  to  whether  all  such  writing  be  not  mere 
abstract  talk  and  rhetoric  set  down  pour  encourager  les 
autres.  You  will  then  be  convinced,  I  trust,  that  these  states 
of  consciousness  of  "union"  form  a  perfectly  definite  class 
of  experiences,  of  which  the  soul  may  occasionally  partake, 
and  which  certain  persons  may  live  by  in  a  deeper  sense 
than  they  live  by  anything  else  with  which  they  have  ac- 
quaintance. This  brings  me  to  a  general  philosophical  re- 
flection with  which  I  should  like  to  pass  from  the  subject  of 
healthy-mindedness,  and  close  a  topic  which  I  fear  is  already 
only  too  long  drawn  out.  It  concerns  the  relation  of  all  this 
systematized  healthy-mindedness  and  mind-cure  religion  to 
scientific  method  and  the  scientific  life. 

In  a  later  lecture  I  shall  have  to  treat  explicitly  of  the  re- 
lation of  religion  to  science  on  the  one  hand,  and  to  pri- 
meval savage  thought  on  the  other.  There  are  plenty  of 
persons  to-day— "scientists"  or  "positivists,"  they  are  fond 
of  calling  themselves— who  will  tell  you  that  religious 
thought  is  a  mere  survival,  an  atavistic  reversion  to  a  type 
of  consciousness  which  humanity  in  its  more  enlightened 

1  Henry  Woon:  Ideal  Suggestion  through  Mental  Photography, 
pp.  51,  70  (abridged). 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       11'/ 

examples  has  long  since  left  behind  and  out-grown.  If  you 
ask  them  to  explain  themselves  more  fully,  they  will  prob- 
ably say  that  for  primitive  thought  everything  is  conceived 
of  under  the  form  of  personality.  The  savage  thinks  that 
things  operate  by  personal  forces,  and  for  the  sake  of  in- 
dividual ends.  For  him,  even  external  nature  obeys  indiv- 
idual needs  and  claims,  just  as  if  these  were  so  many  ele- 
mentary powers.  Now  science,  on  the  other  hand,  these 
positivists  say,  has  proved  that  personality,  so  far  from  being 
an  elementary  force  in  nature,  is  but  a  passive  resultant  of 
the  really  elementary  forces,  physical,  chemical,  physiologi- 
cal, and  psycho-physical,  which  are  all  impersonal  and  gen- 
eral in  character.  Nothing  individual  accomplishes  anything 
in  the  universe  save  in  so  far  as  it  obeys  and  exemplifies 
some  universal  law.  Should  you  then  inquire  of  them  by 
what  means  science  has  thus  supplanted  primitive  thought, 
and  discredited  its  personal  way  of  looking  at  things,  they 
would  undoubtedly  say  it  has  been  by  the  strict  use  of  the 
method  of  experimental  verification.  Follow  out  science's 
conceptions  practically,  they  will  say,  the  conceptions  that 
ignore  personality  altogether,  and  you  will  always  be  cor- 
roborated. The  world  is  so  made  that  all  your  expectations 
will  be  experientially  verified  so  long,  and  only  so  long,  as 
you  keep  the  terms  from  which  you  infer  them  impersonal 
apd  universal. 

But  here  we  have  mind-cure,  with  her  diametrically  op- 
posite philosophy,  setting  up  an  exactly  identical  claim.  Live 
as  if  I  were  true,  she  says,  and  every  day  will  practically 
prove  you  right.  That  the  controlling  energies  of  nature  are 
personal,  that  your  own  personal  thoughts  are  forces,  that 
the  powers  of  the  universe  will  directly  respond  to  your  in- 
dividual appeals  and  needs,  are  propositions  which  your 
whole  bodily  and  mental  experience  will  verify.  And  that 
experience  does  largely  verify  these  primeval  religious  ideas 
is  proved  by  the  fact  that  the  mind-cure  movement  spreads 


Il8       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

as  it  does,  not  by  proclamation  and  assertion  simply,  but  by 
palpable  experiential  results.  Here,  in  the  very  heyday  of 
science's  authority,  it  carries  on  an  aggressive  v^orfare 
against  the  scientific  philosophy,  and  succeeds  by  using 
science's  own  peculiar  methods  and  weapons.  Believing  tha; 
'a  higher  power  will  take  care  of  us  in  certain  ways  better 
than  we  can  take  care  of  ourselves,  if  we  only  genuinely 
throw  ourselves  upon  it  and  consent  to  use  it,  it  finds  the 
belief,  not  only  not  impugned,  but  corroborated  by  its  ob- 
servation. 

How  conversions  are  thus  made,  and  converts  confirmed, 
is  evident  enough  from  the  narratives  which  I  have  quoted. 
I  will  quote  yet  another  couple  of  shorter  ones  to  give  the 
matter  a  perfectly  concrete  turn.  Here  is  one: — 

"One  of  my  first  experiences  in  applying  my  teaching  was 
two  months  after  I  first  saw  the  healer.  I  fell,  spraining  my 
right  ankle,  which  I  had  done  once  four  years  before,  having 
then  had  to  use  a  crutch  and  elastic  anklet  for  some  months, 
and  carefully  guarding  it  ever  since.  As  soon  as  I  was  on  my 
feet  I  made  the  positive  suggestion  (and  felt  it  through  all  my 
being) :  'There  is  nothing  but  God,  and  all  life  comes  from  him 
perfectly.  I  cannot  be  sprained  or  hurt,  I  will  let  him  take  care 
of  it.'  Well,  I  never  had  a  sensation  in  it,  and  I  walked  two 
miles  that  day." 

• 

The  next  case  not  only  illustrates  experiment  and  verifi- 
cation, but  also  the  element  of  passivity  and  surrender  of 
which  awhile  ago  I  made  such  account. 

"I  went  into  town  to  do  some  shopping  one  morning,  and  1 
had  not  been  gone  long  before  I  began  to  feel  ill.  The  ill  feel- 
ing increased  rapidly,  until  I  had  pains  in  all  my  bones,  nausea 
and  faintness,  headache,  all  the  symptoms  in  short  that  pre- 
cede an  attack  of  influenza.  I  thought  that  I  was  going  to  have 
the  grippe,  epidemic  then  in  Boston,  or  something  worse.  The 
mintl-curc  teachings  that  ^  had  been  listening  to  all  the  winter 


TH'E   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      Up 

thereupon  came  into  my  mind,  and  I  thought  that  here  was  an 
opportunity  to  test  myself,  on  my  way  home  I  met  a  friend,  and 
/  refrained  with  some  effort  from  teUing  her  how  I  felt.  That 
was  the  first  step  gained.  I  went  to  bed  immediately,  and  my 
husband  wished  to  send  for  the  doctor.  But  I  told  him  that  I 
would  rather  wait  until  morning  and  see  how  I  felt.  Then  fol- 
lowed one  of  the  most  beautiful  experiences  of  my  life. 

"I  cannot  express  it  in  any  other  way  than  to  say  that  I  did 
'lie  down  in  the  stream  of  life  and  let  it  flow  over  me.'  I  gave 
up  all  fear  of  any  impending  disease;  I  was  perfectly  willing 
and  obedient.  There  was  no  intellectual  effort,  or  train  of 
thought.  My  dominant  idea  was:  'Behold  the  handmaid  of  the 
Lord:  be  it  unto  me  even  as  thou  wilt,'  and  a  perfect  confidence 
that  all  would  be  well,  that  all  was  well.  The  creative  life  was 
flowing  into  me  every  instant,  and  I  felt  myself  allied  with  the 
Infinite,  in  harmony,  and  full  of  the  peace  that  passeth  under- 
standing. There  was  no  place  in  my  mind  for  a  jarring  body. 
I  had  no  consciousness  of  time  or  space  or  persons;  but  only  of 
love  and  happiness  and  faith. 

"I  do  not  know  how  long  this  state  lasted,  nor  when  I  fell 
asleep;  but  when  I  woke  up  in  the  morning,  /  was  well." 

These  are  exceedingly  trivial  instances,^  but  in  them,  if 
we  have  anything  at  all,  we  have  the  method  of  experiment 
and  verification.  For  the  point  I  am  driving  at  now,  it 
makes  no  difference  whether  you  consider  the  patients  to 
be  deluded  victims  of  their  imagination  or  not.  That  they 
seemed  to  themselves  to  have  been  cured  by  the  experiments 
tried  was  enough  to  make  them  converts  to  the  system. 
And  although  it  is  evident  that  one  must  be  of  a  certain 
mental  mould  to  get  such  results  (for  not  every  one  can 
get  thus  cured  to  his  own  satisfaction  any  more  than  everj 
one  can  be  cured  by  the  first  regular  practitioner  whom  h« 
calls  in),  yet  it  would  surely  be  pedantic  and  over-scrupu- 
lous  for  those  who  can  get  their  savage  and  primitive  phil- 

^  See  Appendix  to  this  lecture  for  two  other  cases  furnished  me 
by  friends. 


120       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

osophy  of  mental  healing  verified  in  such  experimental 
ways  as  this,  to  give  them  up  at  word  of  command  for  more 
scientific  therapeutics.  What  are  we  to  think  of  all  this? 
Has  science  made  too  wide  a  claim? 

I  believe  that  the  claims  of  the  sectarian  scientist  are,  to 
say  the  least,  premature.  The  experiences  which  we  have 
been  studying  during  this  hour  (and  a  great  many  other 
kinds  of  religious  experiences  are  like  them)  plainly  show 
the  universe  to  be  a  more  many-sided  afiFair  than  any  sect, 
even  the  scientific  sect,  allows  for.  What,  in  the  end,  are 
all  our  verifications  but  experiences  that  agree  with  more 
or  less  isolated  systems  of  ideas  (concepfual  systems)  that 
our  minds  have  framed?  But  why  in  the  name  of  common 
sense  need  we  assume  that  only  one  such  system  of  ideas 
can  be  true?  The  obvious  outcome  of  our  total  experience 
is  that  the  world  can  be  handled  according  to  many  sys- 
tems of  ideas,  and  is  so  handled  by  different  men,  and  will 
each  time  give  some  characteristic  kind  of  profit,  for  which 
he  cares,  to  the  handler,  while  at  the  same  time  some  other 
kind  of  profit  has  to  be  omitted  or  postponed.  Science  gives 
to  all  of  us  telegraphy,  electric  lighting,  and  diagnosis,  and 
succeeds  in  preventing  and  curing  a  certain  amount  of  dis- 
ease. Religion  in  the  shape  of  mind-cure  gives  to  some  of 
us  serenity,  moral  poise,  and  happiness,  and  prevents  cer- 
tain forms  of  disease  as  well  as  science  does,  or  even  better 
in  a  certain  class  of  persons.  Evidently,  then,  the  science  and 
the  religion  are  both  of  them  genuine  keys  for  unlocking 
the  world's  treasure-house  to  him  who  can  use  either  of 
them  practically.  Just  as  evidendy  neither  is  exhaustive  or 
exclusive  of  the  other's  simultaneous  use.  And  why,  after 
all,  may  not  the  world  be  so  complex  as  to  consist  of  many 
interpenetrating  spheres  of  reality,  which  we  can  thus  ap- 
proach in  alternation  by  using  different  conceptions  and 
assuming  different  attitudes,  just  as  mathematicians  handle 
the  same  numerical  and  spatial  facts  by  geometry,  by  analy- 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS      121 

tical  geometry,  by  algebra,  by  the  calculus,  or  by  quater- 
nions, and  each  time  come  out  right?  On  this  view  religion 
and  science,  each  verified  in  its  own  way  from  hour  tc 
hour  and  from  life  to  life,  would  be  co-eternal.  Primitive 
thought,  with  its  belief  in  individualized  personal  forces^ 
seems  at  any  rate  as  far  as  ever  from  being  driven  by  science 
from  the  field  to-day.  Numbers  of  educated  people  still  find 
it  the  directest  experimental  channfel  by  which  to  carry  on 
their  intercourse  with  reality.^ 

The  case  of  mind-cure  lay  so  ready  to  my  hand  that  I 
could  not  resist  the  temptation  of  using  it  to  bring  these 
last  truths  home  to  your  attention,  but  I  must  content  my- 
self to-day  with  this  very  brief  indication.  In  a  later  lecture 
the  relations  of  religion  both  to  science  and  to  primitive 
thought  will  have  to  receive  much  more  explicit  attention. 


APPENDIX 
(See  note  to  p.  119.) 


Case  I.  "My  own  experience  is  this:  I  had  long  been  ill,  and 
one  of  the  first  results  of  my  illness,  a  dozen  years  before,  had 
been  a  diplopia  which  deprived  me  of  the  use  of  my  eyes  for 
reading  and  writing  almost  entirely,  while  a  later  one  had  been 
to  shut  me  out  from  exercise  of  any  kind  under  penalty  of  im- 
mediate and  great  exhaustion.  I  had  been  under  the  care  of 
doctors  of  the  highest  standing  both  in  Europe  and  America, 
men  in  whose  power  to  help  me  I  had  had  great  faith,  with  no 

^  Whether  the  various  spheres  or  systems  are  ever  to  fuse  in- 
tegrally into  one  absolute  conception,  as  most  philosophers  assume 
that  they  must,  and  how,  if  so,  that  conception  may  best  be  reached, 
are  questions  that  only  the  future  can  answer.  What  is  certain  now 
is  the  fact  of  lines  of  disparate  conception,  each  corresponding  to 
some  part  of  the  world's  truth,  each  verified  in  some  degree,  each 
leaving  out  some  part  of  real  experience. 


122      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

or  ill  result.  Then,  at  a  time  when  I  seemed  to  be  rather  rapidly 
losing  ground,  I  heard  some  things  that  gave  me  interest  enough 
in  mental  healing  to  make  me  try  it;  I  had  no  great  hope  of 
getting  any  good  from  it — it  was  a  chance  I  tried,  partly  because 
my  thought  was  interested  by  the  new  possibility  it  seemed 
to  open,  partly  because  it  was  the  only  chance  I  then  could  see. 
I  went  to  X.  in  Boston,  from  whom  some  friends  of  mine  had 
got,  or  thought  they  hacj  got,  great  help;  the  treatment  was  a 
silent  one;  little  was  said,  and  that  little  carried  no  conviction 
to  my  mind;  whatever  influence  was  exerted  was  that  of  an- 
other person's  thought  or  feeling  silently  projected  on  to  my 
unconscious  mind,  into  my  nervous  system  as  it  were,  as  we 
sat  still  together.  I  believed  from  the  start  in  the  possibility  of 
such  action,  for  I  knew  the  power  of  the  mind  to  shape,  helping 
or  hindering,  the  body's  nerve-activities,  and  I  thought  telep- 
athy probable,  although  unproved,  but  I  had  no  belief  in  it  as 
more  than  a  possibility,  and  no  strong  conviction  nor  any  mystic 
or  religious  faith  connected  with  my  thought  of  it  that  might 
have  brought  imagination  strongly  into  play. 

"I  sat  quietly  with  the  healer  for  half  an  hour  each  day,  at 
first  with  no  result;  then,  after  ten  days  or  so,  I  became  quite 
suddenly  and  swiftly  conscious  of  a  tide  of  new  energy  rising 
within  me,  a  sense  of  power  to  pass  beyond  old  halting-places, 
of  power  to  break  the  bounds  that,  though  often  tried  before, 
had  long  been  veritable  walls  about  my  life,  too  high  to  climb. 
I  began  to  read  and  walk  as  I  had  not  done  for  years,  and  the 
change  was  sudden,  marked,  and  unmistakable.  This  tide 
seemed  to  mount  for  some  weeks,  three  or  four  perhaps,  when, 
summer  having  come,  I  came  away,  taking  the  treatment  up 
again  a  few  months  later.  The  lift  I  got  proved  permanent,  and 
left  me  slowly  gaining  ground  instead  of  losing,  it  but  with 
this  lift  the  influence  seemed  in  a  way  to  have  spent  itself,  and, 
though  my  confidence  in  the  reality  of  the  power  had  gained 
immensely  from  this  first  experience,  and  should  have  helped 
me  to  make  further  gain  in  health  and  strength  if  my  belief  in 
it  had  been  the  potent  factor  there,  I  never  after  this  got  any 
result  at  all  as  striking  or  as  clearly  marked  as  this  which  came 
when  I  made  trial  of  it  first,  with  little  faith  and  doubtful  ex- 
pectation. It  is  difficult  to  put  all  the  evidence  in  such  a  mat- 


THE   RELIGION    OF    HEALTH Y-MINDEDNESS       127, 

ter  into  words,  to  gather  up  into  a  distinct  statement  all  that 
one  bases  one's  conclusions  on,  but  I  have  alv/ays  felt  that 
I  had  abundant  evidence  to  justify  (to  myself,  at  least)  the 
conclusion  that  I  came  to  then,  and  since  have  held  to,  that  the 
physical  change  which  came  at  that  time  was,  first,  the 
result  of  a  change  wrought  within  me  by  a  change  of 
mental  state;  and  secondly,  that  that  change  of  mental  state 
was  not,  save  in  a  very  secondary  way,  brought  about  through 
the  influence  of  an  excited  imagination,  or  a  consciously  re-' 
ceived  suggestion  of  an  hypnotic  sort.  Lastly,  I  believe  that 
this  change  was  the- result  of  my  receiving  telephathically,  ant! 
upon  a  mental  stratum  quite  below  the  level  of  immediate  con- 
sciousness, a  healthier  and  more  energetic  attitude,  receiving  it 
from  another  person  whose  thought  was  directed  upon  me  with 
the  intention  of  impressing  the  idea  of  this  attitude  upon  me.  In 
my  case  the  disease  was  distinctly  what  would  be  classed  as  ner- 
vous, not  organic;  but  from  such  opportunities  as  I  have  had  of 
observing,  I  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  dividing  line 
that  has  been  drawn  is  an  arbitrary  one,  the  nerves  controlling 
the  internal  activities  and  the  nutrition  of  the  body  through- 
out; and  I  believe  that  the  central  nervous  system,  by  starting 
and  inhibiting  local  centres,  can  exercise  a  vast  influence  upon 
disease  of  any  kind,  if  it  can  be  brought  to  bear.  In  my  judgment 
the  question  is  simply  how  to  bring  it  to  bear,  and  I  think  that 
the  uncertainty  and  remarkable  dififerences  in  the  results  ob- 
tained through  mental  healing  do  but  show  how  ignorant  we 
are  as  yet  of  the  forces  at  work  and  of  the  means  we  should  take 
to  make  them  effective.  That  these  results  are  not  due  to  chance 
coincidences  my  observation  of  myself  and  others  makes  me 
sure;  that  the  conscious  mind,  the  imagination,  enters  into  them 
as  a  factor  in  many  cases  is  doubtless  true,  but  in  many  others, 
and  sometimes  very  extraordinary  ones,  it  hardly  seems  to  enter 
in  at  all.  On  the  whole  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  as  the  hcalirtg 
action,  like  the  morbid  one,  springs  from  the  plane  of  the  nor- 
mally unconscious  mind,  so  the  strongest  and  most  effective  im- 
pressions are  those  which  it  receives,  in  some  as  yet  unknown, 
subtle  way,  directly  from  a  healthier  mind  whose  state,  through 
a  hidden  law  of  sympathy,  it  reproduces."  i 


124       THE   VARIE'TIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Case  II.  "At  the  urgent  request  of  friends,  and  with  no  faith 
and  hardly  any  hope  (possibly  owing  to  a  previous  unsuccessful 
experience  with  a  Christian  Scientist),  our  little  daughter  was 
placed  under  the  care  of  a  healer,  and  cured  of  a  trouble  about 
which  the  physician  had  been  very  discouraging  in  his  diagnosis. 
This  interested  me,  and  I  began  studying  earnestly  the  method 
and  philosophy  of  this  method  of  healing.  Gradually  an  inner 
peace  and  tranquillity  came  to  me  in  so  positive  a  way  that  my 
manner  changed  greatly.  My  children  and  friends  noticed  the 
change  and  commented  upon  it.  All  feelings  of  irritability  dis- 
appeared. Even  the  expression  of  my  face  changed  noticeably. 

"I  had  been  bigoted,  aggressive,  and  intolerant  in  discussion, 
both  in  public  and  private.  I  grew  broadly  tolerant  and  receptive 
toward  the  views  of  others.  I  had  been  nervous  and  irritable, 
coming  home  two  or  three  times  a  week  with  a  sick  headache 
induced,  as  I  then  supposed,  by  dyspepsia  and  catarrh.  I  grew 
serene  and  gentle,  and  the  physical  troubles  entirely  disappeared. 
I  had  been  in  the  habit  of  approaching  every  business  interview 
with  an  almost  morbid  dread.  I  now  meet  every  one  with  con- 
fidence and  inner  calm. 

"I  may  say  that  the  growth  has  all  been  toward  the  elimina- 
tion of  selfishness.  I  do  not  mean  simply  the  grosser,  more  sen- 
sual forms,  but  those  subtler  and  generally  unrecognized  kinds, 
such  as  express  themselves  in  sorrow,  grief,  regret,  envy,  etc.  It 
has  been  in  the  direction  of  a  practical,  working  realization  of 
the  immaneme  >i  G'.h<  »ad  the  Divinity  of  man's  true,  inner 
«elf. 


Lectures  VI  and  VII 
THE    SICK    SOUL 

AT  our  last  meeting,  we  considered  the  healthy-minded 
temperament,  the  temperament  which  has  a  constitu- 
tional, incapacity  for  prolonged  suffering,  and  in  which  the 
tendency  to  see  things  optimistically  is  like  a  water  of  crys- 
tallization in  which  the  individual's  character  is  set.  We 
saw  how  this  temperament  may  become  the  basis  for  a 
peculiar  type  of  religion,  a  religion  in  which  good,  even  the 
good  of  this  world's  life,  is  regarded  as  the  essential  thing 
for  a  rational  being  to  attend  to.  This  religion  directs  him 
to  settle  his  scores  with  the  more  evil  aspects  of  the  universe 
by  systematically  declining  to  lay  them  to  heart  or  make 
much  of  them,  by  ignoring  them  in  his  reflective  calcula- 
tions, or  even,  on  occasion,  by  denying  outright  that  they 
exist.  Evil  is  a  disease;  and  worry  over  disease  is  itself  an 
additional  form  of  disease,  which  only  adds  to  the  original 
complaint.  Even  repentance  and  remorse,  affections  which 
come  in  the  character  of  ministers  of  good,  may  be  but 
sickly  and  relaxing  impulses.  The  best  repentance  is  to  up 
and  act  for  righteousness,  and  forget  that  you  ever  had 
relations  with  sin. 

Spinoza's  philosophy  has  this  sort  of  healthy-mindedness 
woven  into  the  heart  of  it,  and  this  has  been  one  secret  of 
its  fascination.  He  whom  Reason  leads,  according  to  Spin- 
oza, is  led  altogether  by  the  influence  over  his  mind  of 
good.  Knowledge  of  evil  is  an  "inadequate"  knowledge,  fit 
only  for  slavish  minds.  So  Spinoza  categorically  condemns 
repentance.  When  men  make  mistakes,  he  says — 

125 


126       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

"One  might  perhaps  expect  gnawings  of  conscience  and  re- 
pentance to  help  to  bring  them  on  the  right  path,  and  might 
thereupon  conclude  (as  every  one  does  conclude)  that  these 
affections  are  good  things.  Yet  when  we  look  at  the  matter  close- 
ly, we  shall  Find  that  not  only  are  they  not  good,  but  on  the  con- 
trary deleterious  and  evil  passions.  For  it  is  manifest  that  we  can 
always  get  along  better  by  reason  and  love  of  truth  than  by 
worry  of  conscience  and  remorse.  Harmful  arc  these  and  evil, 
inasmuch  as  they  form  a  particular  kind  of  sadness;  and  the  dis- 
advantages of  sadness,"  he  continues,  "I  have  already  proved, 
and  shown  that  we  should  strive  to  keep  it  from  our  life.  Just  so 
we  should  endeavor,  since  uneasiness  of  conscience  and  remorse 
are  of  this  kind  of  complexion,  to  flee  and  shun  these  states  of 
mind."  '■ 

Within  the  Christian  body,  for  which  repentance  of  sins 
has  from  the  beginning  been  the  critical  religious  act, 
healthy-mindedness  has  always  come  forward  with  its  mild- 
er interpretation.  Repentance  according  to  such  healthy- 
minded  Christians  means  getting  away  fj'om  the  sin,  not 
groaning  and  writhing  over  its  commission.  The  Catholic 
practice  of  confession  and  absolution  is  in  one  of  its  aspects 
little  more  than  a  systematic  method  of  keeping  healthy- 
mindedness  on  top.  By  it  a  man's  accounts  with  evil  are 
periodically  squared  and  audited,  so  that  he  may  start  the 
clean  page  with  no  old  debts  inscribed.  Any  Catholic  will 
tell  us  how  clean  and  fresh  and  free  he  feels  after  the  purg- 
ing operation.  Martin  Luther  by  no  means  belonged  to  the 
healthy-minded  type  in  the  radical  sense  in  which  we  have 
discussed  it,  and  he  repudiated  priestly  absolution  for  sin. 
Yet  in  this  matter  of  repentance  he  had  some  very  healthy- 
minded  ideas,  due  in  the  main  to  the  largeness  of  his  con- 
ception of  God. 

"When  I  was  a  monk,"  he  says,  "I  thought  that  I  was  utterly 
cast  away,  if  at  any  time  I  felt  the  lust  of  the  flesh:  that  is  to  say, 

^  Tract  on  God,  Man,  and  Happiness,  Book  ii.  ch.  x. 


I 


THE   SICK    SOUL  I27 

if  I  felt  any  evil  motion,  fleshly  lust,  wrath,  hatred,  or  envy 
against  any  brother.  I  assayed  many  ways  to  help  to  quiet  my 
conscience,  but  it  would  not  be;  for  the  concupiscence  and  lust 
of  my  flesh  did  always  return,  so  that  I  could  not  rest,  but  was 
continually  vexed  with  these  thoughts:  This  or  that  sin  thou 
hast  committed:  thou  art  infected  with  envy,  with  impatiency, 
and  such  other  sins:  therefore  thou  art  entered  into  this  holy 
order  in  vain,  and  all  thy  good  works  are  unprofitable.  But  if 
then  I  had  rightly  understood  these  sentences  of  Paul:  'The  flesh 
lusteth  contrary  to  the  Spirit,  and  the  Spirit  contrary  to  the  flesh; 
and  these  two  are  one  against  another,  so  that  ye  cannot  do  the 
things  that  ye  would  do,'  I  should  not  have  so  miserably  tor- 
mented myself,  but  should  have  thought  and  said  to  myself,  as 
now  commonly  I  do,  'Martin,  thou  shalt  not  utterly  be  without 
sin,  for  thou  hast  flesh;  thou  shalt  therefore  feel  the  battle  there- 
of.' I  remember  that  Staupitz  was  wont  to  say,  'I  have  vowed 
unto  God  above  a  thousand  times  that  I  would  become  a  better 
man:  but  I  never  performed  that  which  I  vowed.  Hereafter  I 
will  make  no  such  vow:  for  I  have  now  learned  by  experience 
that  I  am  not  able  to  perform  it.  Unless,  therefore,  God  be  fa 
vorable  and  merciful  unto  me  for  Christ's  sake,  I  shall  not  be 
able,  w^ith  all  my  vows  and  all  my  good  deeds,  to  stand  before 
him.'  This  (of  Staupitz's)  was  not  only  a  true,  but  also  a  godly 
and  a  holy  desperation;  and  this  must  they  all  confess,  both  with 
mouth  and  heart,  who  will  be  saved.  For  the  godly  trust  not  to 
their  own  righteousness.  They  look  unto  Christ  their  reconciler, 
who  gave  his  life  for  their  sins.  Moreover,  they  know  that  the 
remnant  of  sin  which  is  in  their  flesh  is  not  laid  to  their  charge^ 
but  freely  pardoned.  Notwithstanding,  in  the  mean  while  xhej 
fight  in  spirit  against  the  flesh,  lest  they  should  fulfill  the  lusts 
thereof;  and  although  they  feel  the  flesh  to  rage  and  rebel,  and 
themselves  also  do  fall  sometimes  into  sin  through  infirmity 
yet  are  they  not  discouraged,  nor  think  therefore  that  their  state 
and  kind  of  life,  and  the  works  which  are  done  according  tc 
their  calling,  displease  God;  but  they  raise  up  themselves  by 
faith."  1 

^Commentary    on    Galatians,    Philadelphia,    1891,    pp.    510-514 
(abridged). 


T28       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

One  of  the  heresies  for  which  the  Jesuits  got  that  spiritual 
genius,  MoUnos,  the  founder  of  Quietism,  so  abominably 
condemned  was  his  healthy-minded  opinion  of  repent- 
ance : — 

"When  thou  fallest  into  a  fault,  in  what  matter  soever  it  be, 
do  not  trouble  nor  afflict  thyself  for  it.  For  they  are  effects  of  our 
frail  Nature,  stained  by  Original  Sin.  The  common  enemy  will 
make  thee  believe,  as  soon  as  thou  fallest  into  any  fault,  that 
thou  walkest  in  error,  and  therefore  art  out  of  God  and  his 
favor,  and  herewith  would  he  make  thee  distrust  of  the  divine 
Grace,  telling  thee  of  thy  misery,  and  making  a  giant  of  it;  and 
putting  it  into  thy  head  that  every  day  thy  soul  grows  worse  in- 
stead of  better,  whilst  it  so  often  repeats  these  failings.  O  blessed 
Soul,  open  thine  eyes;  and  shut  the  gate  against  these  diabolical 
juggestions,  knowing  thy  misery,  and  trusting  in  the  mercy 
divine.  Would  not  he  be  a  mere  fool  who,  running  at  tourna- 
ment with  others,  and  falling  in  the  best  of  the  career,  should  lie 
weeping  on  the  ground  and  afflicting  himself  with  discourses 
upon  his  fall.''  Man  (they  would  tell  him),  lose  no  time,  get  up 
and  take  the  course  again,  for  he  that  rises  again  quickly  and 
continues  his  race  is  as  if  he  had  never  fallen.  If  thou  seest  thy- 
self fallen  once  and  a  thousand  times,  thou  oughtest  to  make  use 
of  the  remedy  which  I  have  given  thee,  that  is,  a  loving  con- 
fidence in  the  divine  mercy.  These  are  the  weapons  with  which 
thou  must  fight  and  conquer  cowardice  and  vain  thoughts.  This 
is  the  means  thou  oughtest  to  use — not  to  lose  time,  not  to  dis- 
turb thyself,  and  reap  no  good."  ^ 

Now  in  contrast  with  such  healthy-minded  views  as  these, 
if  we  treat  them  as  a  way  of  deliberately  minimizing  evil, 
stands  a  radically  opposite  view,  a  way  of  maximizing  evil, 
if  you  please  so  to  call  it,  based  on  the  persuasion  that  the 
evil  aspects  of  our  life  are  of  its  very  essence,  and  that  the 
world's  meaning  most  comes  home  to  us  when  we  lay  them 
most  to  heart.  We  have  now  to  address  ourselves  to  this 

2  MoLiNos:  Spiritual  Guide,  Book  II.,  chaps,  xvii.,  xviii.  (abridged). 


THE   SICK   SOUL  I29 

more  morbid  way  of  looking  at  the  situation.  But  as  I  closed 
our  last  hour  with  a  general  philosophical  reflection  on  the 
healthy-minded  way  of  taking  life,  I  should  like  at  this 
point  to  make  another  philosophical  reflection  upon  it  be- 
fore turning  to  that  heavier  task.  You  will  excuse  the  brief 
delay. 

If  we  admit  that  evil  is  an  essential  part  of  our  being  and 
the  key  to  the  interpretation  of  our  life,  we  load  ourselves 
down  with  a  difliculty  that  has  always  proved  burdensome 
in  philosophies  of  religion.  Theism,  whenever  it  has  erected 
itself  into  a  systematic  philosophy  of  the  universe,  has  shown 
a  reluctance  to  let  God  be  anything  less  than  Allrin-All.  In 
other  words,  philosophic  theism  has  always  shown  a  tend- 
ency to  become  pantheistic  and  m.onistic,  and  to  consider 
the  world  as  one  unit  of  absolute  fact;  and  this  has  been  at 
variance  with  popular  or  practical  theism,  which  latter  has 
ever  been  more  or  less  frankly  pluralistic,  not  to  say  poly- 
theistic, and  shown  itself  perfectly  well  satisfied  with  a  uni- 
verse composed  of  many  original  principles,  provided  we 
be  only  allowed  to  believe  that  the  divine  principle  remains 
supreme,  and  that  the  others  are  subordinate.  In  this  lattei 
case  God  is  not  necessarily  responsible  for  the  existence  of 
evil;  he  would  only  be  responsible  if  it  were  not  finally 
-  overcome.  But  on  the  monistic  or  pantheistic  view,  evil,  like 
everything  else,  must  have  its  foundation  in  God;  and  the 
diiiiculty  is  to  see  how  this  can  possibly  be  the  case  if  God 
be  absolutely  good.  This  difficulty  faces  us  in  every  form  of 
philosophy  in  which  the  world  appears  as  one  flawless  unit 
of  fact.  Such  a  unit  is  an  Individual,  and  in  it  the  worst 
parts  must  be  as  essential  as  the  best,  must  be  as  necessary 
to  make  the  individual  what  he  is;  since  if  any  part  what- 
ever in  an  individual  were  to  vanish  or  alter,  it  would  no 
longer  be  that  individual  at  all.  The  philosophy  of  absolute 
idealism,  so  vigorously  represented  both  in  Scotland  and 
America  to-day,  has  to  struggle  with  this  difficulty  quite  iv 


^30      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

much  as  scholastic  theism  struggled  in  its  time;  and  al- 
though it  would  be  premature  to  say  that  there  is  no  specu- 
lative issue  whatever  from  the  puzzle,  it  is  perfectly  fair  to 
say  that  there  is  no  clear  or  easy  issue,  and  that  the  only 
obvious  escape  from  paradox  here  is  to  cut  loose  from  the 
monistic  assumption  altogether,  and  to  allow  the  world  to 
have  existed  from  its  origin  in  pluralistic  form,  as  an  aggre- 
gate or  collection  of  higher  and  lower  things  and  principles, 
rather  than  an  absolutely  unitary  fact.  For  then  evil  would 
not  need  to  be  essential;  it  might  be,  and  may  always  have 
been,  an  independent  portion  that  had  no  rational  or  abso- 
lute right  to  live  v/ith  the  rest,  and  which  we  might  con- 
ceivably hope  to  see  got  rid  of  at  last. 

Now  the  gospel  of  healthy-mindedness,  as  we  have  de- 
scribed it,  casts  its  vote  distinctly  for  this  pluralistic  view. 
Whereas  the  monistic  philosopher  finds  himself  more  or 
less  bound  to  say,  as  Hegel  said,  that  everything  actual  is 
rational,  and  that  evil,  as  an  element  dialectically  required, 
must  be  pinned  in  and  kept  and  consecrated  and  have  a 
function  awarded  to  it  in  the  final  system  of  truth,  healthy- 
mindedness  refuses  to  say  anything  of  the  sort.-^  Evil,  it  says, 
is  emphatically  irrational,  and  not  to  be  pinned  in,  or  pre- 
served, or  consecrated  in  any  final  system  of  truth.  It  is  a 
pure  abomination  to  the  Lord,  an  alien  unreality,  a  waste 
element,  to  be  sloughed  off  and  negated,  and  the  very  mem- 
ory of  it,  if  possible,  wiped  out  and  forgotten.  The  ideal,  so 
Ear  from  being  co-extensive  with  the  whole  actual,  is  a 
mere  extract  from  tlie  actual,  marked  by  its  deliverance 

^I  say  this  in  spite  of  the  monistic  utterances  of  many  mind-cure  I 
writers;  for  these  utterances  are  really  inconsistent  with  their  atti- 
tude  towards  disease,  and  can  easily  be  shown  not  to  be  logically 
involved  in  the  experiences  of  union  with  a  higher  Presence  with 
which  they  connect  themselves.  The  higher  Presence,  namely,  need 
not  be  the  absolute  whole  of  things,  it  is  quite  sufficient  for  the  life 
of  religious  experience  to  regard  it  as  a  part,  if  only  it  be  the  most 
,deal  part. 


THE   SICK   SOUL  13! 

from  all  contact  with  this  diseased,  inferior,  and  excrementi- 
tious  stuff. 

Here  we  have  the  interesting  notion  fairly  and  squarely 
presented  to  us,  of  there  being  elements  of  the  universe 
which  may  make  no  rational  whole  in  conjunction  with 
the  other  elements,  and  which,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
any  system  which  those  other  elements  make  up,  can  only 
be  considered  so  much  irrelevance  and  accident — so  much 
"dirt,"  as  it  were,  and  matter  out  of  place.  I  ask  you  now  not 
to  forget  this  notion;  for  although  most  philosophers  seem 
either  to  forget  it  or  to  disdain  it  too  much  ever  to  mention 
it,  I  believe  that  we  shall  have  to  admit  it  ourselves  in  the 
end  as  containing  an  element  of  truth.  The  mind-cure  gos- 
pel thus  once  more  appears  to  us  as  having  dignity  and 
importance.  We  have  seen  it  to  be  a  genuine  religion,  and 
no  mere  silly  appeal  to  imagination  to  cure  disease;  we  have 
seen  its  method  of  experimental  verification  to  be  not  un- 
like the  method  of  all  science;  and  now  here  we  find  mind- 
cure  as  the  champion  of  a  perfecdy  definite  conception  of 
the  metaphysical  structure  of  the  world.  I  hope  that,  in 
view  of  all  this,  you  will  not  regret  my  having  pressed  it 
upon  your  attention  at  such  length. 

Let  us  now  say  good-by  for  a  while  to  all  this  way  of 
thinking,  and  turn  towards  those  persons  who  cannot  so 
swifdy  throw  off  the  burden  of  the  consciousness  of  evil, 
but  are  congenitally  fated  to  suffer  from  its  presence.  Just 
as  we  saw  that  in  healthy-mindedness  there  are  shallower 
and  profounder  levels,  happiness  like  that  of  the  mere  ani- 
mal, and  more  regenerate  sorts  of  happiness,  so  also  are 
there  different  levels  of  the  morbid  mind,  and  the  one  is 
much  more  formidable  than  the  other.  There  are  people 
for  whom  evil  means  only  a  mal-adjustment  with  things,  a 
wrong  correspondence  of  one's  life  with  the  environment. 
Such  evil  as  this  is  curable,  in  principle  at  least,  upon  the 


i:$2      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

natural  plane,  for  merely  by  modifying  either  the  self  or  the 
things,  or  both  at  once,  the  two  terms  may  be  made  to  fit, 
and  all  go  merry  as  a  marriage  bell  again.  But  there  are 
others  for  whom  evil  is  no  mere  relation  of  the  subject  to 
particular  outer  things,  but  something  more  radical  and 
general,  a  wrongness  or  vice  in  his  essential  nature,  which 
no  alteration  of  the  environment,  or  any  superficial  rear- 
rangement of  the  inner  self,  can  cure,  and  which  requires  a 
supernatural  remedy.  On  the  whole,  the  Latin  races  have 
leaned  more  towards  the  former  way  of  looking  upon  evil, 
as  made  up  of  ills  and  sins  in  the  plural,  removable  in  de- 
tail; while  the  Germanic  races  have  tended  rather  to  think 
of  Sin  in  the  singular,  and  with  a  capital  S,  as  of  something 
ineradicably  ingrained  in- our  natural  subjectivity,  and  never 
*-o  be  removed  by  any  superficial  piecemeal  operations.-^ 
These  comparisons  of  races  are  always  open  to  exception, 
but  undoubtedly  the  northern  tone  in  religion  has  inclined 
to  the  more  intimately  pessimistic  persuasion,  and  this  way 
of  feeling,  being  the  more  extreme,  we  shall  find  by  far  the 
more  instructive  for  our  study. 

Recent  psychology  has  found  great  use  for  the  word 
"threshold"  as  a  symbolic  designation  for  the  point  at  which 
one  state  of  mind  passes  into  another.  Thus  wc  speak  of 
the  threshold  of  a  man's  consciousness  in  general,  to  in- 
dicate the  amount  of  noise,  pressure,  or  other  outer  stimulus 
which  it  takes  to  arouse  his  attention  at  all.  One  with  a 
high  threshold  will  doze  through  an  amount  of  racket  by 
which  one  with  a  low  threshold  would  be  immediately 
waked.  Similarly,  when  one  is  sensitive  to  small  differences 
in  any  order  of  sensation,  we  say  he  has  a  low  "difference- 
threshold" — his  mind  easily  steps  over  it  into  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  differences  in  question.  And  just  so  we  might 
speak  of  a  "pain-threshold,"  a  "fear-threshold,"  a  "misery- 

*  Cf.  }.  Milsand:  Luther  et  le  Serf-Arbitre,  1884,  passim. 


THE   SICK    SOUL  133 

threshold,"  and  find  it  quickly  overpassed  by  the  conscious- 
ness of  some  individuals,  but  lying  too  high  in  others  to 
be  often  reached  by  their  consciousness.  The  sanguine  and 
healthy-minded  live  habitually  on  the  sunny  side  of  their 
misery-line,  the  depressed  and  melancholy  live  beyond  it, 
in  darkness  and  apprehension.  There  are  men  who  seem  to 
have  started  in  life  with  a  bottle  or  two  of  champagne  in- 
scribed to  their  credit;  whilst  others  seem  to  have  been  born 
close  to  the  pain-threshold,  which  the  slightest  irritancs 
fatally  send  them  over. 

Does  it  not  appear  as  if  one  who  lived  more  habitually 
on  one  side  of  the  pain-threshold  might  need  a  different 
sort  of  religion  from  one  who  habitually  lived  on  the  other  ? 
This  question,  of  the  relativity  of  different  types  of  religion 
to  different  types  of  need,  arises  naturally  at  this  point, 
and  will  became  a  serious  problem  ere  we  have  done.  But 
before  we  confront  it  in  general  terms,  we  must  address 
ourselves  to  the  unpleasant  task  of  hearing  what  the  sick 
souls,  as  we  may  call  them  in  contrast  to  the  healthy-mind- 
ed, have  to  say  of  the  secrets  of  their  prison-house,  their  own 
peculiar  form  of  consciousness.  Let  us  then  resolutely  turn 
our  backs  on  the  once-born  and  their  sky-blue  optimistic 
gospel;  let  us  not  simply  cry  out,  in  spite  of  all  appearances, 
"Hurrah  for  the  Universe! — God's  in  his  Heaven,  all's  right 
with  the  world."  Let  us  see  rather  whether  pity,  pain,  and 
fear,  and  the  sentiment  of  human  helplessness  may  no! 
open  a  profounder  view  and  put  into  our  hands  a  mor( 
complicated  key  to  the  meaning  of  the  situation. 

To  begin  with,  how  ca7i  things  so  insecure  as  the  success- 
ful experiences  of  this  world  afford  a  stable  anchorage?  A 
chain  is  no  stronger  than  its  weakest  link,  and  life  is  after 
all  a  chain.  In  the  healthiest  and  most  prosperous  existence, 
how  many  links  of  illness,  danger,  and  disaster  are  always 
interposed?  Unsuspectedly  from  the  bottom  of  every  foun- 


^34       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tain  of  pleasure,  as  the  old  poet  said,  something  bitter  rises 
up:  a  touch  of  nausea,  a  falling  dead  of  the  delight,  a  whiflF 
of  melancholy,  things  that  sound  a  knell,  for  fugitive  as 
they  may  be,  they  bring  a  feeling  of  coming  from  a  deeper 
region  and  often  have  an  appalling  convincingness.  The 
buzz  of  life  ceases  at  their  touch  as  a  piano-string  stops 
sounding  when  the  damper  falls  upon  it. 

Of  course  the  music  can  commence  again; — and  again 
and  again — at  intervals.  But  with  this  the  healthy-minded 
consciousness  is  left  with  an  irremediable  sense  of  precari- 
ousness.  It  is  a  bell  with  a  crack;  it  draws  its  breath  on 
sufferance  and  by  an  accident. 

Even  if  we  suppose  a  man  so  packed  with  healthy-mind- 
edness  as  never  to  have  experienced  in  his  own  person  any 
of  these  sobering  intervals,  still,  if  he  is  a  reflecting  being, 
he  must  generalize  and  class  his  own  lot  with  that  of  others; 
and,  doing  so,  he  must  see  that  his  escape  is  just  a  lucky 
chance  and  no  essential  difference.  He  might  just  as  well 
have  been  born  to  an  entirely  different  fortune.  And  then 
indeed  the  hollow  security!  What  kind  of  a  frame  of  things 
is  it  of  which  the  best  you  can  say  is,  "Thank  God,  it  has  let 
me  off  clear  this  time!"  Is  not  its  blessedness  a  fragile  fic- 
tion? Is  not  your  joy  in  it  a  very  vulgar  glee,  not  much 
unlike  the  snicker  of  any  rogue  at  his  success?  If  indeed  it 
were  all  success,  even  on  such  terms  as  that!  But  take  the 
happiest  man,  the  one  most  envied  by  the  world,  and  in 
nine  cases  out  of  ten  his  inmost  consciousness  is  one  of 
failure.  Either  his  ideals  in  the  line  of  his  achievements  are 
pitched  far  higher  than  the  achievements  themselves,  or 
else  he  has  secret  ideals  of  which  the  world  knows  nothing, 
and  in  regard  to  which  he  inwardly  knows  himself  to  be 
found  wanting. 

When  such  a  conquering  optimist  as  Goethe  can  express 
himself  in  this  wise,  how  must  it  be  with  less  successful 
men? 


THE   SICK  SOUL  I35 

"I  will  say  nothing,"  writes  Goethe  in  1824,  "against  tht 
course  of  my  existence.  But  at  bottom  it  has  been  nothing  bur 
pain  and  burden,  and  I  can  affirm  that  during  the  whole  of  m) 
75  years,  I  have  not  had  four  weeks  of  genuine  well-being.  It  is 
but  the  perpetual  rolling  of  a  rock  that  must  be  raised  up  again 
forever." 

What  single-handed  man  was  ever  on  the  whole  as  suc- 
cessful as  Luther?  yet  when  he  had  grown  old,  he  looked 
back  on  his  life  as  if  it  were  an  absolute  failure. 

"I  am  utterly  weary  of  life.  I  pray  the  Lord  will  come  forth- 
with and  carry  me  hence.  Let  him  come,  above  all,  with  his  last 
Judgment:  I  will  stretch  out  my  neck,  the  thunder  will  burst 
forth,  and  I  shall  be  at  rest." — And  having  a  necklace  of  white 
agates  in  his  hand  at  the  time  he  added:  "O  God,  grant  that  it 
may  come  without  delay.  I  would  readily  eat  up  this  necklace 
to-day,  for  the  Judgment  to  come  to-morrow." — The  Electress 
Dowager,  one  day  when  Luther  was  dining  with  her,  said  to 
him:  "Doctor,  I  v/ish  you  may  live  forty  years  to  come."  "Mad- 
am,"  replied  he,  "rather  than  live  forty  years  more,  I  would  give 
up  my  chance  of  Paradise." 

Failure,  then,  failure!  so  the  world  stamps  us  at  every 
turn.  We  strew  it  with  our  blunders,  our  misdeeds,  our  lost 
opportunities,  with  all  the  memorials  of  our  inadequacy  to 
our  vocation.  And  with  what  a  damning  emphasis  does  it 
then  blot  us  out!  No  easy  fine,  no  mere  apology  or  formal 
expiation,  will  satisfy  the  world's  demands,  but  every 
pound  of  flesh  exacted  is  soaked  with  all  its  blood.  The 
subtlest  forms  of  suffering  known  to  man  are  connected 
with  the  poisonous  humiliations  incidental  to  these  results. 

And  they  are  pivotal  human  experiences.  A  process  so 
ubiquitous  and  everlasting  is  evidently  an  integral  part  of 
life.  "There  is  indeed  one  element  in  human  destiny,"  Rob- 
ert Louis  Stevenson  writes,  "that  not  blindness  itself  can 
controvert.  Whatever  else  we  are  intended  to  do,  we  are  no^ 


136       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

intended  to  succeed;  failure  is  the  fate  allotted."^  And  our 
nature  being  thus  rooted  in  failure,  is  it  any  wonder  that 
theologians  should  have  held  it  to  be  essential,  and  diought 
that  only  through  the  personal  experience  of  humiliation 
which  it  engenders  the  deeper  sense  of  life's  significance  is 
reached?^ 

But  this  is  only  the  first  stage  of  the  world-sickness.  Make 
the  human  being's  sensitiveness  a  little  greater,  carry  him 
a  little  farther  over  the  misery-threshold,  and  the  good  qual- 
ity of  the  successful  moments  themselves  when  they  occur 
is  spoiled  and  vitiated.  All  natural  goods  perish.  Riches  take 
wings;  fame  is  a  breath;  love  is  a  cheat;  youth  and  health 
and  pleasure  vanish.  Can  things  whose  end  is  always  dust 
tind  disappointment  be  the  real  goods  which  our  souls  re- 
quire? Back  of  everything  is  the  great  spectre  of  universal 
death,  the  all-encompassing  blackness: — 

"What  profit  hath  a  man  of  all  his  labour  which  he  taketh 
under  the  Sun?  I  looked  on  all  the  works  that  my  hands  had 
wrought,  and  behold,  all  was  vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit.  For 
that  which  befalleth  the  sons  of  men  befalleth  beasts;  as  the 
one  dieth,  so  dieth  the  other;  all  are  of  the  dust,  and  all  turn  to 
dust  again.  .  .  .  The  dead  know  not  anything,  neither  have 
they  any  more  a  reward;  for  the  memory  of  them  is  forgotten. 

^  He  adcK  witli  characteristic  healtliy-mindedness:  "Our  business 
is  to  continue  to  fail  in  good  spirits." 

2  The  God  of  many  men  is  little  more  than  dieir  court  of  appeal 
against  die  damnatory  judgment  passed  on  their  failures  by  the 
opinion  of  this  world.  To  our  own  consciousness  there  is  usually 
a  residuum  of  wordi  left  over  after  our  sins  and  errors  have  been 
told  off — our  capacity  of  acknowledging  and  regretdng  them  is  the 
germ  of  a  better  self  in  posse  at  least.  But  the  world  deals  with  us 
in  actti  and  not  in  posse:  and  of  this  hidden  germ,  not  to  be  guessed 
at  from  widiout,  it  never  takes  account.  Then  we  turn  to  the  All- 
knower,  who  knows  our  bad,  but  knows  this  good  in  us  also,  and 
who  is  just.  We  cast  ourselves  with  our  repentance  on  his  mercy: 
only  by  an  All-knower  can  we  finally  be  judged.  So  die  need  of  a 
God  very  definitely  emerges  from  tliis  sort  of  experience  of  life. 


THE   SICK    SOUL  13^ 

Also  their  love  and  their  hatred  and  their  envy  is  now  perished; 
neither  have  they  any  more  a  portion  for  ever  in  anything  that 
is  done  under  the  Sun.  .  .  .  Truly  the  light  is  sweet,  and  a 
pleasant  thing  it  is  for  the  eyes  to  behold  the  Sun:  but  if  a  man 
live  many  years  and  rejoice  in  them  all,  yet  let  him  remember 
the  days  of  darkness;  for  they  shall  be  many." 

In  short,  life  and  its  negation  are  beaten  up  inextricably 
together.  But  if  the  life  be  good,  the  negation  of  it  must  be 
bad.  Yet  the  two  are  equally  essential  facts  of  existence; 
and  all  natural  happiness  thus  seems  infected  with  a  contra- 
diction. The  breath  of  the  sepulchre  surrounds  it. 

To  a  mind  attentive  to  this  state  of  things  and  rightly 
subject  to  the  joy-destroying  chill  which  such  a  contempla- 
tion engenders,  the  only  relief  that  healthy-mindedness  can 
give  is  by  saying:  "Stufif  and  nonsense,  get  out  into  the 
open  air!"  or  "Cheer  up,  old  fellow,  you'll  be  all  right  ere- 
long, if  you  will  only  drop  your  morbidness!"  But  in  all 
seriousness,  can  such  bald  animal  talk  as  that  be  treated 
as  a  rational  answer?  To  ascribe  religious  value  to  mere 
happy-go-lucky  contentment  with  one's  brief  chance  at 
natural  good  is  but  the  very  consecration  of  forgetfulness 
and  superficiality.  Our  troubles  lie  indeed  too  deep  for  that 
cure.  The  fact  that  we  can  die,  that  we  can  be  ill  at  all,  is 
what  perplexes  us;  the  fact  that  we  now  for  a  moment  live 
and  arc  well  is  irrelevant  to  that  perplexity.  We  need  a  life 
not  correlated  with  death,  a  health  not  liable  to  illness,  a 
kind  of  good  that  will  not  perish,  a  good  in  fact  that  flies 
beyond  the  Goods  of  nature. 

It  all  depends  on  how  sensitive  the  soul  may  become  to 
discords.  "The  trouble  with  me  is  that  I  believe  too  much 
in  common  happiness  and  goodness,"  said  a  friend  of  min. 
whose  consciousness  was  of  this  sort,  "and  nothing  can  con- 
sole me  for  their  transiency.  I  am  appalled  and  disconcerted 
at  its  being  possible."  And  so  with  most  of  us:  a  little  cool- 
ing down  of  animal  excitability  and  instinct,  a  little  loss  of 


138       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

animal  toughness,  a  little  irritable  weakness  and  descent  of 
the  pain-threshold,  will  bring  the  worm  at  the  core  of  all 
our  usual  springs  of  delight  into  full  view,  and  turn  us  into 
melancholy  metaphysicians.  The  pride  of  life  and  glory  of 
the  world  will  shrivel.  It  is  after  all  but  the  standing  quar- 
rel of  hot  youth  and  hoary  eld.  Old  age  has  the  last  word: 
the  purely  naturalistic  look  at  life,  however  enthusiastically 
it  may  begin,  is  sure  to  end  in  sadness. 

This  sadness  lies  at  the  heart  of  every  merely  positivistic, 
agnostic,  or  naturalistic  scheme  of  philosophy.  Let  sanguine 
healthy-mindedness  do  its  best  with  its  strange  power  of 
living  in  the  moment  and  ignoring  and  forgetting,  still  the 
evil  background  is  really  there  to  be  thought  of,  and  the 
skull  will  grin  in  at  the  banquet.  In  the  practical  life  of  the 
individual,  we  know  how  his  whole  gloom  or  glee  about 
any  present  fact  depends  on  the  remoter  schemes  and  hopes 
with  which  it  stands  related.  Its  significance  and  framing 
give  it  the  chief  part  of  its  value.  Let  it  be  known  to  lead 
nowhere,  and  however  agreeable  it  may  be  in  its  immediacy, 
its  glow  and  gilding  vanish.  The  old  man,  sick  with  an  in- 
sidious internal  disease,  may  laugh  and  quaff  his  wine  at 
first  as  well  as  ever,  but  he  knows  his  fate  now,  for  the  doc- 
tors have  revealed  it;  and  the  khowleds;e  knocks  the  satis- 
faction  out  of  all  these  functions.  They  are  partners  of 
death  and  the  worm  is  their  brother,  and  they  turn  to  a 
mere  flatness. 

The  lustre  of  the  present  hour  is  always  borrowed  from 
the  background  of  possibilities  it  goes  with.  Let  our  com- 
mon experiences  be  enveloped  in  an  eternal  moral  order; 
let  our  suffering  have  an  immortal  significance;  let  Heaven 
smile  upon  the  earth,  and  deities  pay  their  visits;  let  faith 
and  hope  be  the  atmosphere  which  man  breathes  in; — and 
his  days  pass  by  with  zest;  they  stir  with  prospects,  they 
thrill  with  remoter  values.  Place  round  them  on  the  con- 
trary  the   curdling   cold   and   gloom   and    absence  of   al' 


i: 


THE   SICK   SOUL  I39 

permanent  meaning  which  for  pure  naturahsm  and  the 
popular  science  evolutionism  of  our  time  are  all  that  is 
visible  ultimately,  and  the  thrill  stops  short,  or  turns  rather 
to  an  anxious  trembling. 

For  naturalism,  fed  on  recent  cosmological  speculations, 
mankind  is  in  a  position  similar  to  that  of  a  set  of  people 
living  on  a  frozen  lake,  surrounded  by  cliffs  over  which 
there  is  no  escape,  yet  knowing  that  little  by  little  the  ice  is 
melting,  and  the  inevitable  day  drawing  near  when  the  last 
film  of  it  will  disappear,  and  to  be  drowned  ignominiously 
will  be  the  human  creature's  portion.  The  merrier  the  skat- 
ing, the  warmer  and  more  sparkling  the  sun  by  day,  and 
the  ruddier  the  bonfires  at  night,  the  more  poignant  the 
sadness  with  which  one  must  take  in  the  meaning  of  the 
total  situation. 

The  early  Greeks  are  continually  held  up  to  us  in  literary 
works  as  models  of  the  healthy-minded  joyousness  which 
the  religion  of  nature  may  engender.  There  was  indeed 
much  joyousness  among  the  Greeks — Homer's  flow  of  en- 
thusiasm for  most  things  that  the  sun  shines  upon  is  steady. 
But  even  in  Homer  the  reflective  passages  are  cheerless,^ 
and  the  moment  the  Greeks  grew  systematically  pensive 
and  thought  of  ultimates,  they  became  unmitigated  pessi- 
mists.^ The  jealousy  of  the  gods,  the  nemesis  that  follows 

^  E.g.,  Iliad  XVII.  446:  "Nothing  tlien  is  more  wretched  any- 
where than  man  of  all  that  breathes  and  creeps  upon  this  earth." 

^E.g.,  Theognis,  425-428:  "Best  of  all  for  all  things  upon  earth 
is  it  not  to  be  born  nor  to  behold  the  splendors  of  the  Sun;  next 
best  to  traverse  as  soon  as  possible  the  gates  of  Hades."  See  also  the 
almost  identical  passage  in  CEdipus  in  Colonus,  1225. — The  An- 
thology is  full  of  pessimistic  utterances:  "Naked  came  I  upon  the 
earth,  naked  I  go  below  the  ground — why  then  do  I  vainly  toil 
when  I  see  the  end  naked  before  me?" — "How  did  I  come  to  be? 
Whence  am  I?  Wherefore  did  I  come?  To  pass  away.  How  can  I 
learn  aught  when  naught  I  know?  Being  naught  I  came  to  life: 
once  more  shall  I  be  what  I  was.  Nothing  and  nothingness  is  thu 


140      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

too  much  happiness,  the  all-encompassing  death,  fate's  dark 
opacity,  the  ultimate  and  unintelligible  cruelty,  were  the 
fixed  background  of  their  imagination.  The  beautiful  joy- 
ousness  of  their  polytheism  is  only  a  poetic  modern  fiction. 
They  knew  no  joys  comparable  in  quality  of  preciousness 
to  those  which  we  shall  erelong  see  that  Brahmans,  Budd- 
hists, Christians,  Mohammedans,  twice-born  people  whose 
religion  is  non-naturalistic,  get  from  their  several  creeds  of 
mysticism  and  renunciation. 

Stoic  insensibility  and  Epicurean  resignation  were  the 
farthest  advance  which  the  Greek  mind  made  in  that  direc- 
tion. The  Epicurean  said:  "Seek  not  to  be  happy,  but  rather 
to  escape  unhappiness;  strong  happiness  is  always  linked 
with  pain;  therefore  hug  the  safe  shore,  and  do  not  tempt 
the  deeper  raptures.  Avoid  disappointment  by  expecting 
little,  and  by  aiming  low;  and  above  all  do  not  fret."  The 
Stoic  said:  "The  only  genuine  good  that  life  can  yield  a  man 
is  the  free  possession  of  his  own  soul;  all  other  goods  are 
lies."  Each  of  these  philosophies  is  in  its  degree  a  philosophy 
of  despair  in  nature's  boons.  Trustful  self-abandonment  to 
the  joys  that  freely  offer  has  entirely  departed  from  both 
Epicurean  and  Stoic;  and  what  each  proposes  is  a  way  of 
rescue  from  the  resultant  dust-and-ashes  state  of  mind.  The 

whole  race  of  mortals." — "For  death  we  are  all  cherished  and  fat- 
tened like  a  herd  of  hogs  that  is  wantonly  butchered." 

The  difference  between  Greek  pessimism  and  the  oriental  and 
modern  variety  is  that  the  Greeks  had  not  made  the  discovery  that 
the  pathetic  mood  may  be  idealized,  and  figure  as  a  higher  form 
of  sensibility.  Their  spirit  was  still  too  essentially  masculine  for 
pessimism  to  be  elaborated  or  lengthily  dwelt  on  in  their  classic 
literature.  They  would  have  despised  a  life  set  wholly  in  a  minor 
key,  and  summoned  it  to  keep  within  the  proper  bounds  of  lachry- 
mosity.  The  discovery  that  the  enduring  emphasis,  so  far  as  this 
world  goes,  may  be  laid  on  its  pain  and  failure,  was  reserved  for 
races  more  complex,  and  (so  to  speak)  more  feminine  than  the 
Hellenes  had  attained  to  being  in  the  classic  period.  But  all  the 
same  was  the  oudook  of  diose  Hellenes  blackly  pessimistic. 


THE   SICK    SOUL  I4I 

Epicurean  still  awaits  results  from  economy  of  indulgence 
and  damping  of  desire.  The  Stoic  hopes  for  no  results,  and 
gives  up  natural  good  altogether.  There  is  dignity  in  both 
these  forms  of  resignation.  They  represent  distinct  stages 
in  the  sobering  process  which  man's  primitive  intoxication 
with  sense-happiness  is  sUre  to  undergo.  In  the  one  the  hot 
blood  has  grown  cool,  in  the  other  it  has  become  quite  cold; 
and  although  I  have  spoken  of  them  in  the  past  tense,  as 
if  they  were  merely  historic,  yet  Stoicism  and  Epicureanism 
will  probably  be  to  all  time  typical  attitudes,  marking  a 
certain  definite  stage  accomplished  in  the  evolution  of  the 
world-sick  soul.^  They  mark  the  conclusion  of  what  we  call 
the  once-born  period,  and  represent  the  highest  flights  of 
what  twice-born  religion  would  call  the  purely  natural  man 
— Epicureanism,  which  can  only  by  great  courtesy  be  called 
a  religion,  showing  his  refinement,  and  Stoicism  exhibiting 
his  moral  will.  They  leave  the  world  in  the  shape  of  an  un- 
reconciled contradiction,  and  seek  no  higher  unity.  Com- 
pared with  the  complex  ecstasies  which  the  supernaturally 
regenerated  Christian  may  enjoy,  or  the  oriental  pantheist 
indulge  in,  their  receipts  for  equanimity  are  expedients 
which  seem  almost  crude  in  their  simplicity. 

Please  observe,  however,  that  I  am  not  yet  pretending 
finally  to  judge  any  of  these  attitudes.  I  am  only  describing 
their  variety. 

1  For  instance,  on  the  very  day  on  which  I  write  this  page,  the 
post  brings  me  some  aphorisms  from  a  worldly-wise  old  friend  in 
Heidelberg  which  may  serve  as  a  good  contemporaneous  expression 
of  Epicureanism:  "By  the  word  'happiness'  bvery  human  being  un- 
derstands something  different.  It  is  a  phantom  pursued  only  by 
weaker  minds.  The  wise  man  is  satisfied  with  the  more  modest  but 
much  more  definite  term  contentment.  What  educadon  should 
chiefly  aim  at  is  to  save  us  from  a  discontented  life.  Health  is  one 
favoring  condition,  but  by  no  means  an  indispensable  one,  of  con- 
tentment. Woman's  heart  and  love  are  a  shrewd  device  of  Nature, 
a  trap  which  she  sets  for  the  average  man,  to  force  him  into  work 
ing.  But  the  wise  man  will  always  prefer  work  chosen  by  himself.' 


142       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

The  securest  way  to  the  rapturous  sorts  of  happiness  of 
which  the  twice-born  make  report  has  as  an  historic  matter 
of  fact  been  through  a  niore  radical  pessimism  than  any- 
thing that  we  have  yet  considered.  We  have  seen  how  the 
lustre  and  enchantment  may  be  rubbed  ofl  from  the  goods 
of  nature.  But  there  is  a  pitch  of  unhappiness  so  great  that 
the  goods  of  nature  may  be  entirely  forgotten,  and  all  senti- 
ment of  their  existence  vanish  from  the  mental  field.  For 
this  extremity  of  pessimism  to  be  reached,  something  more 
is  needed  than  observation  of  life  and  reflection  upon  death. 
The  individual  must  in  his  own  person  become  the  prey 
of  a  pathological  melancholy.  As  the  healthy-minded  en- 
thusiast succeeds  in  ignoring  evil's  very  existence,  so  the 
subject  of  melancholy  is  forced  in  spite  of  himself  to  ignore 
that  of  all  good  whatever:  for  him  it  may  no  longer  have 
the  least  reality.  Such  sensitiveness  and  susceptibility  to 
mental  pain  is  a  rare  occurrence  where  the  nervous  consti- 
tution is  entirely  normal;  one  seldom  finds  it  in  a  healthy 
subject  even  where  he  is  the  victim  of  the  most  atrocious 
cruelties  of  outward  fortune.  So  we  note  here  the  neurotic 
constitution,  of  which  I  said  so  much  in  my  first  lecture, 
making  its  active  entrance  on  our  scene,  and  destined  to 
play  a  part  in  much  that  follows.  Since  these  experiences  of 
melancholy  are  in  the  first  instance  absolutely  private  and 
mdividual,  I  can  now  help  myself  out  with  personal  docu- 
ments. Painful  indeed  they  will  be  to  listen  to,  and  there 
is  almost  an  indecency  in  handling  them  in  public.  Yet 
they  lie  right  in  the  middle  of  our  path;  and  if  we  are  to 
touch  the  psychology  of  religion  at  all  seriously,  we  must 
be  willing  to  forget  conventionalities,  and  dive  below  the 
smooth  and  lying  official  conversational  surface. 

One  can  distinguish  many  kinds  of  pathological  depres- 
sion. Sometimes  it  is  mere  passive  joylessness  and  dreariness, 
discouragement,  dejection,  lack  of  taste  and  zest  and  spring. 


THE  SICK   SOUL  I43 

Professor  Ribot  has  proposed  the  name  anhedonia  to  desig. 
jiate  this  condition. 

"The  state  of  anhedonia,  if  I  may  coin  a  new  word  to  pair  off 
with  analgesia"  he  writes,  "has  been  very  httle  studied,  but  it 
exists.  A  young  girl  was  smitten  with  a  hver  disease  which  for 
some  time  altered  her  constitution.  She  felt  no  longer  any  affec- 
tion for  her  father  and  mother.  She  would  have  played  with  her 
doll,  but  it  was  impossible  to  find  the  least  pleasure  in  the  act. 
The  same  things  which  formerly  convulsed  her  with  laughter 
entirely  failed  to  interest  her  now.  Esquirol  observed  the  case  of 
a  very  intelligent  magistrate  who  was  also  a  prey  to  hepatic  dis- 
ease. Every  emotion  appeared  dead  within  him.  He  manifested 
neither  perversion  nor  violence,  but  complete  absence  of  emo' 
tional  reaction.  If  he  went  to  the  theatre,  which  he  did  out  of 
habit,  he  could  find  no  pleasure  there.  The  thought  of  his  house, 
of  his  home,  of  his  wife,  and  of  his  absent  children  moved  him 
as  little,  he  said,  as  a  theorem  of  Euclid."  ^ 

Prolonged  seasickness  will  in  most  persons  produce  a 
temporary  condition  of  anhedonia.  Every  good,  terrestrial 
or  celestial,  is  imagined  only  to  be  turned  from  with  dis- 
gust. A  tem_porary  condition  of  this  sort,  connected  with 
the  religious  evolution  of  a  singularly  lofty  character,  both 
intellectual  and  moral,  is  well  described  by  the  Catholic 
philosopher,  Father  Gratry,  in  his  autobiographical  recol. 
lections.  In  consequence  of  mental  isolation  and  excessive 
study  at  the  Polytechnic  school,  young  Gratry  fell  into  4 
state  of  nervous  exhaustion  with  symptoms  which  he  thus 
describes: — 

"I  had  such  a  universal  terror  that  I  woke  at  night  with  a 
start,  thinking  that  the  Pantheon  was  tumbling  on  the  Poly- 
technic  school,  or  that  the  school  was  in  flames,  or  that  the  Sein*"- 
was  pouring  into  the  Catacombs,  and  that  Paris  was  being  swal 

^  Ribot:  Psychologie  des  sentiments,  p.  54. 


144       ^^^   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

lowed  up.  And  when  these  impressions  were  past,  all  day  long 
without  respite  I  suffered  an  incurable  and  intolerable  desola- 
tion, verging  on  despair.  I  thought  myself,  in  fact,  rejected  by 
God,  lost,  damned!  I  felt  something  like  the  suffering  of  hell. 
Before  that  I  had  never  even  thought  of  hell.  My  mind  had 
never  turned  in  that  direction.  Neither  discourses  nor  reflections 
had  impressed  me  in  that  way.  I  took  no  account  of  hell.  Now, 
and  all  at  once,  I  suffered  in  a  measure  what  is  suffered  there. 

"But  what  was  perhaps  still  more  dreadful  is  that  every  idea 
of  heaven  was  taken  away  from  me:  I  could  no  longer  conceive 
of  anything  of  the  sort.  Heaven  did  not  seem  to  me  worth  going 
to.  It  was  like  a  vacuum;  a  mythological  elysium,  an  abode  of 
shadows  less  real  than  the  earth.  I  could  conceive  no  joy,  no 
pleasure  in  inhabiting  it.  Happiness,  joy,  light,  affection,  love — 
all  these  words  were  now  devoid  of  sense.  Without  doubt  I  could 
still  have  talked  of  all  these  things,  but  I  had  become  incapable 
of  feeling  anything  in  them,  of  understanding  anything  about 
them,  of  hoping  anything  from  them,  or  of  believing  them  to 
exist.  There  was  my  great  and  inconsolable  grief!  I  neither  per- 
ceived nor  conceived  any  longer  the  existence  of  happiness  or 
perfection.  An  abstract  heaven  over  a  naked  rock.  Such  was  my 
present  abode  for  eternity."  ^ 

^  A.  Gratry:  Souvenirs  de  ma  jeunesse,  1880,  pp.  119-121, 
abridged.  Some  persons  are  affected  with  anhedonia  permanently, 
or  at  any  rate  with  a  loss  of  the  usual  appetite  for  life.  The  annals 
of  suicide  supply  such  examples  as  the  following: — 

An  uneducated  domestic  servant,  aged  nineteen,  poisons  herself, 
and  leaves  two  letters  expressing  her  modve  for  the  act.  To  her 
parents  she  writes: — 

"Life  is  sweet  perhaps  to  some,  but  I  prefer  what  is  sweeter  than 
life,  and  that  is  death.  So  good-by  forever,  my  dear  parents.  It  is 
nobody's  fault,  but  a  strong  desire  of  my  own  which  I  have  longed 
to  fulfill  for  three  or  four  years.  I  have  always  had  a  hope  that 
some  day  I  might  have  an  opportunity  of  fulfilling  it,  and  now  it 
has  come.  ...  It  is  a  wonder  I  have  put  this  off  so  long,  but  I 
thought  perhaps  I  should  cheer  up  a  bit  and  put  all  thought  out  of 
my  head."  To  her  brother  she  writes:  "Good-by  forever,  my  own 
dearest  brother.  By  the  time  you  get  this  I  shall  be  gone  forever.  I 
know,  dear  love,  there  is  no  forgiveness  for  what  I  am  going  to  do. 


THE   SICK   SOUL  I45 

So  much  for  melancholy  in  the  aense  of  incapacity  foi 
joyous  feeling.  A  much  worse  form  of  it  is  positive  and 
active  anguish,  a  sort  of  psychical  neuralgia  wholly  unknown 
to  healthy  life.  Such  anguish  may  partake  of  various  char- 
acters, having  sometimes  more  the  quality  of  loathing; 
sometimes  that  of  irritation  and  exasperation;  or  again  of 
self-mistrust  and  self-despair;  or  of  suspicion,  anxiety,  trepi- 
dation, fear.  The  patient  may  rebel  or  submit;  may  accuse 
himself,  or  accuse  outside  powers;  and  he  may  or  he  may 
not  be  tormented  by  the  theoretical  mystery  of  why  he 
should  so  have  to  suffer.  Most  cases  are  mixed  cases,  and 
we  should  not  treat  our  classifications  with  too  much  re- 
spect. Moreover,  it  is  only  a  relatively  small  proportion  of 
cases  that  connect  themselves  with  the  religious  sphere  of 
experience  at  all.  Exasperated  cases,  for  instance,  as  a  rule 
do  not.  I  quote  now  literally  from  the  first  case  of  melan- 
choly on  which  I  lay  my  hand.  It  is  a  letter  from  a  patient 
in  a  French  asylum. 

"I  suffer  too  much  in  this  hospital,  both  physically  and  mor- 
ally. Besides  the  burnings  and  the  sleeplessness  (for  I  no  longer 
sleep  since  I  am  shut  up  here,  and  the  little  rest  I  get  is  broken 
by  bad  dreams,  and  I  am  waked  with  a  jump  by  night  mares, 
dreadful  visions,  lightning,  thunder,  and  the  rest),  fear,  atro- 
cious fear,  presses  me  down,  holds  me  without  respite,  never  lets 
me  go.  Where  is  the  justice  in  it  all!  What  have  I  done  to  de- 
serve this  excess  of  severity?  Under  what  form  will  this  feai 
crush  me  ?  What  would  I  not  owe  to  any  one  who  would  rid  me 
of  my  life!  Eat,  drink,  lie  awake  all  night,  suffer  without  inter- 
ruption— such  is  the  fine  legacy  I  have  received  from  my  mo 
ther!  What  I  fail  to  understand  is  this  abuse  of  power.  There 
are  limits  to  everything,  there  is  a  middle  way.  But  God  knows 
neither  middle  way  nor  limits.  I  say  God,  but  why?  All  I  have 

...  I  am  tired  of  living,  so  am  willing  to  die.  .  .  .  Life  may  he 
sweet  to  some,  but  death  to  me  is  sweeter."  S.  A.  K.  Strahan; 
Suicide  and  Insanity,  2d  edidon,  London,  1894,  p.  131. 


146'     THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

known  so  far  has  been  the  devil.  After  all,  I  am  afraid  of  God 
as  much  as  of  the  devil,  so  I  drift  along,  thinking  of  nothing 
hilt  suicide,  but  with  neither  courage  nor  means  here  to  execute 
the  act.  As  you  read  this,  it  will  easily  prove  to  you  my  insanity. 
The  style  and  the  ideas  are  incoherent  enough — I  can  see  that 
myself.  But  I  cannot  keep  myself  from  being  either  crazy  or  an 
idiot;  and,  as  things  are,  from  whom  should  I  ask  pity?  I  am  de- 
fenseless against  the  invisible  enemy  who  is  tightening  his  coils 
iround  me.  I  should  be  no  better  armed  against  him  even  if  I 
jaw  him,  or  had  seen  him.  Oh,  if  he  would  but  kill  me,  devil 
cake  him!  Death,  death,  once  for  all!  But  I  stop.  I  have  raved  to 
you  long  enough.  I  say  raved,  for  I  can  write  no  otherwise,  hav- 
ing neither  brain  nor  thoughts  left.  O  God!  what  a  misfortune 
to  be  born!  Born  like  a  mushroom,  doubtless  between  an  even- 
mg  and  a  morning;  and  how  true  and  right  I  was  when  in  our 
philosophy-year  in  college  I  chewed  the  cud  of  bitterness  with 
the  pessimists.  Yes,  indeed,  there  is  more  pain  in  life  than  glad- 
ness— it  is  one  long  agony  until  the  grave.  Think  how  gay  it 
makes  me  to  remember  that  this  horrible  misery  of  mine, 
coupled  with  this  unspeakable  fear,  may  last  fifty,  one  hundred, 
who  knows  how  many  more  years!"  ^ 

This  letter  shows  two  things.  First,  you  see  how  the  en- 
tire consciousness  of  the  poor  man  is  so  choked  with  the 
feeling  of  evil  that  the  sense  of  there  being  any  good  in 
the  world  is  lost  for  him  altogether.  His  attention  excludes 
it,  cannot  admit  it:  the  sun  has  left  his  heaven.  And  second- 
ly you  see  how  the  querulous  temper  of  his  misery  keeps 
his  mind  from  taking  a  religious  direction.  Querulousness 
of  mind  tends  in  fact  rather  towards  irreligion;  and  it  has 
played,  so  far  as  I  know,  no  part  whatever  in  the  construc- 
tion of  religious  systems. 

Religious  melancholy  must  be  cast  in  a  more  melting 
mood.  Tolstoy  has  left  us,  in  his  book  called  My  Confession, 

^  RouBiNoviTCH  ET  TouLousE:  La  Melancolie,  1897,  P-  ^7^, 
abridged. 


THE    SICK    SOUL  14}' 

a  wonderful  account  of  the  attack  of  melancholy  which  led 
him  to  his  own  religious  conclusions.  The  latter  in  some 
respects  are  peculiar;  but  the  melancholy  presents  two  char- 
acters which  make  it  a  typical  document  for  our  present 
purpose.  First  it  is  a  well-marked  case  of  anhedonia,  of 
passive  loss  of  appetite  for  all  life's  values;  and  second,  it 
shows  how  the  altered  and  estranged  aspect  which  the 
world  assumed  in  consequence  of  this  stimulated  Tolstoy's 
intellect  to  a  gnav^^ing,  carking  questioning  and  effort  for 
philosophic  relief.  I  mean  to  quote  Tolstoy  at  some  length; 
but  before  doing  so,  I  will  make  a  general  remark  on  each 
of  these  two  points. 

First  on  our  spiritual  judgments  and  the  sense  of  value  in 
general. 

It  is  notorious  that  facts  are  compatible  with  opposite 
emotional  comments,  since  the  same  fact  will  inspire  en- 
tirely different  feelings  in  different  persons,  and  at  different 
times  in  the  same  person;  and  there  is  no  rationally  deduc- 
ible  connection  between  any  outer  fact  and  the  sentiments 
it  may  happen  to  provoke.  These  have  their  source  in 
another  sphere  of  existence  altogether,  in  the  animal  and 
spiritual  region  of  the  subject's  being.  Conceive  yourself, 
if  possible,  suddenly  stripped  of  all  the  emotion  with  which 
your  world  now  inspires  you,  and  try  to  imagine  it  as  it 
exists,  purely  by  itself,  without  your  favorable  or  unfavor- 
able, hopeful  or  apprehensive  comment.  It  will  be  almost 
impossible  for  you  to  realize  such  a  condition  of  negativity 
and  deadness.  No  one  portion  of  the  universe  would  then 
have  importance  beyond  another;  and  the  whole  collection 
of  its  things  and  series  of  its  events  would  be  without  sig- 
nificance, character,  expression,  or  perspective.  Whatever  of 
value,  interest,  or  meaning  our  respective  worlds  may  ap- 
pear endued  with  are  thus  pure  gifts  of  the  spectator's 
mind.  The  passion  of  love  is  the  most  familiar  and  extreme 
example  of  this  fact.  If  it  comes,  it  comes;  if  it  does  no'. 


148       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

oomc,  no  process  of  reasoning  can  force  it.  Yet  it  transforms 
the  value  of  tiie  creature  loved  as  utterly  as  the  sunrise 
transforms  Mont  Blanc  from  a  corpse-like  gray  to  a  rosy 
enchantment;  and  it  sets  the  whole  world  to  a  new  tune 
for  the  lover  and  gives  a  new  issue  to  his  life.  So  with  fear, 
with  indignation,  jealousy,  ambition,  worship.  If  they  are 
there,  life  changes.  And  whether  they  shall  be  there  or  not 
depends  almost  always  upon  non-logical,  often  on  organic 
conditions.  And  as  the  excited  interest  which  these  passions 
put  into  the  world  is  our  gift  to  the  world,  just  so  are  the 
passions  themselves  gifts — gifts  to  us,  from  sources  some- 
times low  and  sometimes  high;  but  almost  always  non- 
logical  and  beyond  our  control.  How  can  the  moribund  old 
man  reason  back  to  himself  the  romance,  the  mystery,  the 
imminence  of  great  things  with  which  our  old  earth  tingled 
for  him  in  the  days  when  he  was  young  and  well?  Gifts, 
either  of  the  flesh  or  of  the  spirit;  and  the  spirit  bloweth 
where  it  listeth;  and  the  world's  materials  lend  their  sur- 
face passively  to  all  the  gifts  alike,  as  the  stage-setting  re- 
ceives indifferently  whatever  alternating  colored  lights  may 
be  shed  upon  it  from  the  optical  apparatus  in  the  gallery. 

Meanwhile  the  practically  real  world  for  each  one  of  us, 
the  effective  world  of  the  individual,  is  the  compound 
world,  the  physical  facts  and  emotional  values  in  indistin- 
guishable combination.  Withdraw  or  pervert  either  factor 
of  this  complex  resultant,  and  the  kind  of  experience  we 
call  pathological  ensues. 

In  Tolstoy's  case  the  sense  that  life  had  any  meaning 
whatever  was  for  a  time  wholly  withdrawn.  The  result  was 
a  transformation  in  the  whole  expression  of  reality.  When 
we  come  to  study  the  phenomenon  of  conversion  or  religi- 
ous regeneration,  we  shall  see  that  a  not  infrequent  con- 
sequence of  the  change  operated  in  the  subject  is  a  trans- 
.  figuration  of  the  face  of  nature  in  his  eyes.  A  new  heaven 
<eems  to  shine  upon  a  new  earth.  In  melancholiacs  there  is 


THE   SICK    SOUL  I49 

usually  a  similar  change,  only  it  is  in  the  reverse  direction 
The  world  now  looks  remote,  strange,  sinister,  uncanny 
Its  color  is  gone,  its  breath  is  cold,  there  is  no  speculation 
in  the  eyes  it  glares  with.  "It  is  as  if  I  lived  in  anothei 
century,"  says  one  asylum  patient. — "I  see  everything 
through  a  cloud,"  says  another,  "things  are  not  as  they 
were,  and  I  am  changed." — "I  see,"  says  a  third,  "I  touch, 
but  the  things  do  not  come  near  me,  a  thick  veil  alters  the 
hue  and  look  of  everything." — "Persons  move  like  shadows, 
and  sounds  seem  to  come  from  a  distant  world." — "There 
is  no  longe*  any  past  for  me;  people  appear  so  strange;  it 
is  as  if  I  could  not  see  any  reaHty,  as  if  I  were  in  a  theatre; 
as  if  people  were  actors,  and  everything  were  scenery;  I  can 
no  longer  find  myself;  I  walk,  but  why?  Everything  floats 
before  my  eyes,  but  leaves  no  impression." — "I  weep  false 
tears,  I  have  unreal  hands:  the  things  I  see  are  not  real 
things." — Such  are  expressions  that  naturally  rise  to  the 
lips  of  melancholy  subjects  describing  their  changed  state.' 

Now  there  are  some  subjects  whom  all  this  leaves  a  prey 
to  the  profoundest  astonishment.  The  strangeness  is  wrong 
The  unreality  cannot  be.  A  mystery  is  concealed,  and  a 
metaphysical  solution  must  exist.  If  the  natural  world  is  so 
double-faced  and  unhomelike,  what  world,  what  thing  is 
real?  An  urgent  wondering  and  questioning  is  set  up,  a 
poring  theoretic  activity,  and  in  the  desperate  effort  to  get 
into  right  relations  with  the  matter,  the  sufTerer  is  often  led 
to  what  becomes  for  him  a  satisfying  religious  solution. 

At  about  the  age  of  fifty,  Tolstoy  relates  that  he  began 
to  have  moments  of  perplexity,  of  what  he  calls  arrest,  as 
if  he  knew  not  "how  to  live,"  or  what  to  do.  It  is  obvious 
that  these  were  moments  in  which  the  excitement  and  in- 
terest which  our  functions  naturally  bring  had  ceased.  Life 
had  been  enchanting,  it  was  now  flat  sober,  more  than 

^  I  cull  these  examples  from  the  work  of  G.  Dumas:  La  Tristesse 
ci  la  Joic,  1900. 


150       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

sober,  dead.  Things  were  meaningless  whose  meaning  had 
always  been  self-evident.  The  questions  "Why?"  and  "What 
next?"  began  to  beset  him  more  and  more  frequently.  At 
first  it  seemed  as  if  such  questions  must  be  answerable, 
and  as  if  he  could  easily  find  the  answers  if  he  would  take 
the  time;  but  as  they  ever  became  more  urgent,  he  perceived 
that  it  was  like  those  first  discomforts  of  a  sick  man,  to 
which  he  pays  but  little  attention  till  they  run  into  one 
continuous  suffering,  and  then  he  realizes  that  what  he  took 
for  a  passing  disorder  means  the  most  momentous  thing  in 
the  world  for  him,  means  his  death.  • 

These  questions  "Why?"  "Wherefore?"  "What  for?" 
found  no  response. 

"I  felt,"  says  Tolstoy,  "that  something  had  broken  within  me 
on  which  my  life  had  always  rested,  that  I  had  nothing  left  to 
hold  on  to,  and  that  morally  my  life  had  stopped.  An  invincible 
force  impelled  me  to  get  rid  of  my  existence,  in  one  way  or  an- 
other. It  cannot  be  said  exactly  that  I  wished  to  kill  myself,  for 
the  force  which  drew  me  away  from  life  was  fuller,  more  power- 
ful, more  general  than  any  mere  desire.  It  was  a  force  like  my 
old  aspiration  to  live,  only  it  impelled  me  in  the  opposite  direc- 
tion. It  was  an  aspiration  of  my  whole  being  to  get  out  of  life. 

"Behold  me  then,  a  man  happy  and  in  good  health,  hiding 
the  rope  in  order  not  to  hang  myself  to  the  rafters  of  the  room 
where  every  night  I  went  to  sleep  alone;  behold  me  no  longer 
going  shooting,  lest  1  should  yield  to  the  too  easy  temptation  of 
putting  an  end  to  myself  with  my  gun. 

"I  did  not  know  what  I  wanted.  I  was  afraid  of  life;  I  was 
driven  to  leave  it;  and  in  spite  of  that  I  still  hoped  something 
from  it. 

"All  this  took  place  at  a  time  when  so  far  as  all  my  outer  cir- 
cumstances went,  I  ought  to  have  been  completely  happy.  I  had 
,  a  good  wife  who  loved  m.e  and  whom  I  loved;  good  children  and 
a  large  property  which  was  increasing  with  no  pains  taken  on 
my  part.  I  was  more  respected  by  my  kinsfolk  and  acquaintance 
than  I  had  ever  been;  I  was  loaded  with  praise  by  strangers;  and 


THE   SICK    SOUL  I5I 

without  exaggeration  I  could  believe  my  name  already  famous. 
Moreover  I  was  neither  insane  nor  ill.  On  the  contrary,  I  pos- 
sessed a  physical  and  mental  strength  which  I  have  rarely  met  in 
persons  of  my  age.  I  could  mow  as  well  as  the  peasants,  I  could 
work  with  my  brain  eight  hours  uninterruptedly  and  feel  no  bad 
effects. 

"And  yet  I  could  give  no  reasonable  meaning  to  any  actions/ 
of  my  life.  And  I  was  surprised  that  I  had  not  understood  this 
from  the  very  beginning.  My  state  of  mind  was  as  if  some  wick- 
ed and  stupid  jest  was  being  played  upon  me  by  some  one.  One 
can  live  only  so  long  as  one  is  intoxicated,  drunk  w'th  life;  but 
when  one  grows  sober  one  cannot  fail  to  see  that  it  is  all  a  stupid 
cheat.  What  is  truest  about  it  is  that  there  is  nothing  even  funny 
or  silly  in  it;  it  is  cruel  and  stupid,  purely  and  simply. 

"The  oriental  fable  of  the  traveler  surprised  in  the  desert  bj 
a  wild  beast  is  very  old. 

"Seeking  to  save  himself  from  the  fierce  animal,  the  traveler 
jumps  into  a  well  with  no  water  in  it;  but  at  the  bottom  of  thi; 
well  he  sees  a  dragon  waiting  with  open  mouth  to  devour  him. 
And  the  unhappy  man,  not  daring  to  go  out  lest  he  should  be 
the  prey  of  the  beast,  not  daring  to  jump  to  the  bottom  lest  he 
should  be  devoured  by  the  dragon,  clings  to  the  branches  of  a 
wild  bush  which  grows  out  of  one  of  the  cracks  of  the  well.  His 
hands  weaken,  and  he  feels  that  he  must  soon  give  way  to  cer 
tain  fate;  but  still  he  clings,  and  see  two  mice,  one  white,  the 
other  black,  evenly  moving  round  the  bush  to  which  he  hangs- 
and  gnawing  off  its  roots. 

"The  traveler  sees  this  and  knows  that  he  must  inevitably 
perish;  but  while  thus  hanging  he  looks  about  him  and  finds 
on  the  leaves  of  the  bush  some  drops  of  honey.  These  he  reaches 
with  his  tongue  and  licks  them  off  with  rapture. 

"Thus  I  hang  upon  the  boughs  of  life,  knowing  that  the  in- 
evitable dragon  of  death  is  waiting  ready  to  tear  me,  and  I 
cannot  comprehend  why  I  am  thus  made  a  martyr.  I  try  to  suck 
the  honey  which  formerly  consoled  me;  but  the  honey  pleases 
me  no  longer,  and  day  and  night  the  white  mouse  and  the  black 
mouse  gnaw  the  branch  to  which  I  cling.  I  can  see  but  one 
thing:  the  inevitable  dragon  and  the  mice — I  cannot  turn  my 
gaze  away  from  them. 


152       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

"This  is  no  fable,  but  the  literal  incontestable  truth  which 
•^very  one  may  understand.  What  will  be  the  outcome  of  what 
I'  do  to-day?  Of  what  I  shall  do  to-morrow?  What  will  be  the 
outcome  of  all  my  life?  Why  should  I  live?  Why  should  I  do 
anything?  Is  there  in  life  any  purpose  which  the  inevitable  death 
which  awaits  me  does  not  undo  and  destroy? 

"These  questions  are  the  simplest  in  the  world.  From  the 
stupid  child  to  the  wisest  old  man,  they  are  in  the  soul  of  every 
human  being.  Without  an  answer  to  them,  it  is  impossible,  as  I 
experienced,  for  life  to  go  on. 

"  'But  perhaps,'  I  often  said  to  myself,  'there  may  be  some- 
thing I  have  failed  to  notice  or  to  comprehend.  It  is  not  possible 
that  this  condition  of  despair  should  be  natural  to  mankind.' 
And  I  sought  for  an  explanation  in  all  the  branches  of  knowl- 
edge acquired  by  men.  I  questioned  painfully  and  protractedly 
and  with  no  idle  curiosity.  I  sought,  not  with  indolence,  but 
laboriously  and  obstinately  for  days  and  nights  together.  I  sought 
like  a  man  who  is  lost  and  seeks  to  save  himself — and  I  found 
nothing.  I  became  convinced,  moreover,  that  all  those  who  be- 
fore me  had  sought  for  an  answer  in  the  sciences  have  also  found 
nothing.  And  not  only  this,  but  that  they  have  recognized  that 
the  very  thing  which  was  leading  me  to  despair — the  meaning- 
less absurdity  of  life — is  the  only  incontestable  knowledge  ac- 
cessible to  man." 

To  prove  this  point,  Tolstoy  quotes  the  Buddha,  Solo- 
mon, and  Schopenhauer.  And  he  finds  only  four  ways  in 
which  men  of  his  own  class  and  society  are  accustomed  to 
meet  the  situation.  Either  mere  animal  blindness,  sucking 
the  honey  without  seeing  the  dragon  or  the  mice — "and 
from  such  a  way,"  he  says,  "I  can  learn  nothing,  after  what 
I  now  know;"  or  reflective  epicureanism,  snatching  what  it 
can  while  the  day  lasts — which  is  only  a  more  deliberate 
sort  of  stupefaction  than  the  first;  or  manly  suicide;  or  see- 
ing the  mice  and  dragon  and  yet  weakly  and  plaintively 
clinging  to  the  bush  of  life. 


THE   SICK   SOUL  I53 

Suicide  was  naturally  the  consistent  course  dictated  by 
the  logical  intellect. 

"Yet,"  says  Tolstoy,  "whilst  my  intellect  was  working,  some- 
thing else  in  me  was  working  too,  and  kept  me  from  the  deed 
— a  consciousness  of  life,  as  I  may  call  it,  which  was  like  a  force 
that  obliged  my  mind  to  fix  itself  in  another  direction  and  draw 
me  out  of  my  situation  of  despair.  .  .  .  During  the  whole 
course  of  this  year,  when  I  almost  unceasingly  kept  asking  my- 
self how  to  end  the  business,  whether  by  the  rope  or  by  the 
bullet,  during  all  that  time,  alongside  of  all  those  movements  of 
my  ideas  and  observations,  my  heart  kept  languishing  with 
another  pining  emotion.  I  can  call  this  by  no  other  name  than 
that  of  a  thirst  for  God.  This  craving  for  God  had  nothing  to  do 
with  the  movement  of  my  ideas — in  fact,  it  was  the  direct  con- 
trary of  that  movement — but  it  came  from  my  heart.  It  was  like 
a  feeling  of  dread  that  made  me  seem  like  an  orphan  and  isolat- 
ed in  the  midst  of  all  these  things  that  were  so  foreign.  And  this 
feeling  of  dread  was  mitigated  by  the  hope  of  finding  the  as- 
sistance of  some  one."  ^ 

Of  the  process,  intellectual  as  well  as  emotional,  which, 
starting  from  this  idea  of  God,  led  to  Tolstoy's  recovery,  I 
will  say  nothing  in  this  lecture,  reserving  it  for  a  later  hour. 
The  only  thing  that  need  interest  us  now  is  the  pheno- 
menon of  his  absolute  disenchantment  with  ordinary  life, 
and  the  fact  that  the  whole  range  of  habitual  values  may,  to 
a  man  as  powerful  and  full  of  faculty  as  he  was,  come  to 
appear  so  ghastly  a  mockery. 

When  disillusionment  has  gone  as  far  as  this,  there  is 
seldom  a  restitutio  ad  integrum.  One  has  tasted  of  the  fruit 
of  the  tree,  and  the  happiness  of  Eden  never  comes  again. 
The  happiness  that  comes,  when  any  does  come — and  often 
enough  it  fails  to  return  in  an  acute  form,  though  its  form 

^  My  extracts  are  from  the  French  translation  by  "Zonia."  In 
abridging  I  have  taken  the  liberty  of  transposing  one  passage. 


154      "^^^  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

is  sometimes  very  acute — is  not  the  simple,  ignorance  of  ill, 
but  something  vastly  more  complex,  including  natural  evil 
as  one  of  its  elements,  but  finding  natural  evil  no  such 
stumbling-block  and  terror  because  it  now  sees  it  swallowed 
up  in  supernatural  good.  The  process  is  one  of  redemption, 
not  of  mere  reversion  to  natural  health,  and  the  sufFerer, 
when  saved,  is  saved  by  what  seems  to  him  a  second  birth, 
a  deeper  kind  of  conscious  being  than  he  could  enjoy 
before. 

We  find  a  somewhat  different  type  of  religious  melan- 
choly enshrined  in  literature  in  John  Bunyan's  autobio- 
graphy. Tolstoy's  preoccupations  were  largely  objective,  for 
the  purpose  and  meaning  of  life  in  general  was  what  so 
troubled  him;  but  poor  Bunyan's  troubles  were  over  the 
condition  of  his  own  personal  self.  He  was  a  typical  case 
of  the  psychopathic  temperament,  sensitive  of  conscience  to 
a  diseased  degree,  beset  by  doubts,  fears  and  insistent  ideas, 
and  a  victim  of  verbal  automatisms,  both  motor  and  sens- 
ory. These  were  usually  texts  of  Scripture  which,  sometimes 
damnatory  and  sometimes  favorable,  would  come  in  a  half- 
hallucinatory  form  as  if  they  were  voices,  and  fasten  on  his 
mind  and  buffet  it  between  them  like  a  shuttlecock.  Added 
lo  this  were  a  fearful  melancholy  self-contempt  and  despair. 

"Nay,  thought  I,  now  I  grow  worse  and  worse;  now  I  am 
farther  from  conversion  than  ever  I  was  before.  If  now  I  should 
have  burned  at  the  stake,  I  could  not  believe  that  Christ  had  love 
for  me;  alas,  I  could  neither  hear  him,  nor  see  him,  nor  feel  him, 
nor  savor  any  of  his  things.  Sometimes  I  would  tell  my  condi- 
tion to  the  people  of  God,  which,  when  they  heard,  they  would 
pity  me,  and  would  tell  of  the  Promises.  But  they  had  as  good 
have  told  me  that  I  must  reach  the  Sun  with  my  finger  as  have 
bidden  me  receive  or  rely  upon  the  Promise  [Yet]  all  this  while 
as  to  the  act  of  sinning,  I  never  was  more  tender  than  now;  I 
durst  not  take  a  pin  or  stick,  though  but  so  big  as  a  straw,  for 


THE    SICK    SOUL  I55 

my  conscience  now  was  sore,  and  would  smart  at  every  touch; 
I  could  not  tell  how  to  speak  my  words,  for  fear  I  should  mis- 
place them.  Oh,  how  gingerly  did  I  then  go,  in  all  I  did  or  said! 
I  found  myself  as  on  a  miry  bog  that  shook  if  I  did  but  stir;  and 
was  as  there  left  both  by  God  and  Christ,  and  the  spirit,  and 
all  good  things. 

"But  my  original  and  inward  pollution,  that  was  my  plague 
and  my  affliction.  By  reason  of  that,  I  was  more  loathsome  in 
my  own  eyes  than  was  a  toad;  and  I  thought  I  was  so  in  God's 
eyes  too.  Sin  and  corruption,  I  said,  would  as  naturally  bubble 
out  of  my  heart  as  water  would  bubble  out  of  a  fountain.  I 
could  have  changed  heart  with  anybody.  I  thought  none  but  the 
Devil  himself  could  equal  me  for  inward  wickedness  and  pollu- 
tion of  mind.  Sure,  thought  I,  I  am  forsaken  of  God;  and  thus 
I  continued  a  long  while,  even  for  some  years  together. 

"And  now  I  was  sorry  that  God  had  made  me  a  man.  The 
beasts,  birds,  fishes,  etc.,  I  blessed  their  condition,  for  they  had 
not  a  sinful  nature;  they  were  not  obnoxious  to  the  wrath  of 
God;  they  were  not  to  go  to  hell-fire  after  death.  I  could  there- 
fore have  rejoiced,  had  my  condition  been  as  any  of  theirs.  Now 
I  blessed  the  condition  of  the  dog  and  toad,  yea,  gladly  would 
I  have  been  in  the  condition  of  the  dog  or  horse,  for  I  knew 
they  had  no  soul  to  perish  under  the  everlasting  weight  of  Hell 
or  Sin,  as  mine  was  like  to  do.  Nay,  and  though  I  saw  this,  felt 
this,  and  was  broken  to  pieces  with  it,  yet  that  which  added  to 
my  sorrow  was,  that  I  could  not  find  with  all  my  soul  that  I  did 
desire  deliverance.  My  heart  was  at  times  exceedingly  hard.  I! 
I  would  have  given  a  thousand  pounds  for  a  tear,  I  could  not 
shed  one;  no,  nor  sometimes  scarce  desire  to  shed  one. 

"I  was  both  a  burthen  and  a  terror  to  myself;  nor  did  I  ever 
so  know,  as  now,  what  it  was  to  be  weary  of  my  life,  and  yet 
afraid  to  die.  How  gladly  would  I  have  been  anything  but  my- 
self! Anything  but  a  man!  and  in  any  condition  but  my  own."  ' 

Poor  patient  Bunyan,  like  Tolstoy,  saw  the  light  again, 
but  we  must  also  postpone  that  part  of  his  story  to  anothei 

1  Grace  abounding  to  the  Chief  of  Sinners:  I  have  printed  a  num 
her  of  detached  passages  continuously. 


T56       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hour.  In  a  later  lecture  I  will  also  give  the  end  of  the  ex- 
perience of  Henry  Alline,  a  devoted  evangelist  who  worked 
in  Nova  Scotia  a  hundred  years  ago,  and  who  thus  vividly 
describes  the  high-water  mark  of  the  religious  melancholy 
which  formed  its  beginning.  The  type  was  not  unlike  Bun- 
yan's. 

"Everything  I  saw  seemed  to  be  a  burden  to  me;  the  earth 
leemed  accursed  for  my  sake:  all  trees,  plants,  rocks,  hills,  and 
vales  seemed  to  be  dressed  in  mourning  and  groaning,  under  the 
weight  of  the  curse,  and  everything  around  me  seemed  to  be 
conspiring  my  ruin.  My  sins  seemed  to  be  laid  open;  so  that  I 
thought  that  every  one  I  saw  knew  them,  and  sometimes  I  was 
almost  ready  to  acknowledge  many  things,  which  I  thought 
they  knew:  yea  sometimes  it  seemed  to  me  as  if  every  one  was 
pointing  me  out  as  the  most  guilty  wretch  upon  earth.  I  had 
now  so  great  a  sense  of  the  vanity  and  emptiness  of  all  things 
here  below,  that  I  knew  the  whole  world  could  not  possibly 
make  me  happy,  no,  nor  the  whole  system  of  creation.  When  I 
waked  in  the  morning,  the  first  thought  would  be,  Oh,  my 
wretched  soul,  what  shall  I  do,  where  shall  I  go?  And  when  I 
laid  down,  would  say,  I  shall  be  perhaps  in  hell  before  morning. 
I  would  many  times  look  on  the  beasts  with  envy,  wirhing  with 
all  my  heart  I  was  in  their  place,  that  I  might  have  no  soul  to 
lose;  and  when  I  have  seen  birds  flying  over  my  head,  have  often 
thought  within  myself,  Oh,  that  I  could  fly  away  from  my  dan- 
ger and  distress!  Oh,  how  happy  should  I  be,  if  I  were  in  their 
place!" ^ 

Envy  of  the  placid  beasts  seems  to  be  a  very  widespread 
affection  in  this  type  of  sadness. 

The  worst  kind  of  melancholy  is  that  which  takes  the 
form  of  panic  fear.  Here  is  an  excellent  example,  for  per- 
mission to  print  which  I  have  to  thank  the  sufferer.  The 

^  The  Life  and  Journal  of  the  Rev.  Mr.  Henry  Alline,  Boston, 
1806,  pp.  25,  26.  I  owe  my  acquaintance  with  this  book  to  my  col- 
Veague,  Dr.  Benjamin  Rand. 


THE   SICK    SOUL  I57 

original  is  in  French,  and  though  the  subject  was  evidently 
in  a  bad  nervous  condition  at  the  time  of  which  he  writes, 
his  case  has  otherwise  the  merit  of  extreme  simpHcity.  I 
translate  freely. 

"Whilst  in  this  state  of  philosophic  pessimism  and  general 
depression  of  spirits  about  my  prospects,  I  went  one  evening  into 
a  dressing-room  in  the  twilight  to  procure  some  article  that  was 
there;  when  suddenly  there  fell  upon  me  without  any  warning, 
just  as  if  it  came  out  of  the  darkness,  a  horrible  fear  of  my  own 
existence.  Simultaneously  there  arose  in  my  mind  the  image  of 
an  epileptic  patient  whom  I  had  seen  in  the  asylum,  a  black- 
haired  youth  with  greenish  skin,  entirely  idiotic,  v/ho  used  to 
sit  all  day  on  one  of  the  benches,  or  rather  shelves  against  the 
wall,  with  his  knees  drawn  up  against  his  chin,  and  the  coarse 
gray  undershirt,  which  was  his  only  garment,  drawn  over  them 
inclosing  his  entire  figure.  He  sat  there  like  a.  sort  of  sculptured 
Egyptian  cat  or  Peruvian  mummy,  moving  nothing  but  his 
black  eyes  and  looking  absolutely  non-human.  This  image  and 
my  fear  entered  into  a  species  of  combination  with  each  other. 
That  shape  am  I,  I  felt,  potentially.  Nothing  that  I  possess  can 
defend  me  against  that  fate,  if  the  hour  for  it  should  strike  for 
me  as  it  struck  for  him.  There  was  such  a  horror  of  him,  and 
such  a  perception  of  my  own  merely  momentary  discrepancy 
from  him,  that  it  was  as  if  something  hitherto  solid  within  my 
breast  gave  way  entirely,  and  I  became  a  mass  of  quivering  fear. 
After  this  the  universe  was  changed  for  me  altogether.  I  awokf 
morning  after  morning  with  a  horrible  dread  at  the  pit  of  my 
stomach,  and  with  a  sense  of  the  insecurity  of  life  that  I  never 
knew  before,  and  that  I  have  never  felt  since.^  It  was  like  a 

^Compare  Bunyan:  "There  was  I  struck  into  a  very  great  trem. 
bling,  insomuch  that  at  some  times  I  could,  for  days  together,  feel 
my  very  body,  as  well  as  my  mind,  to  shake  and  totter  under  the 
sense  of  the  dreadful  judgment  of  God,  that  should  fall  on  diose 
that  have  sinned  that  most  fearful  and  unpardonable  sin.  I  felt  also 
such  clogging  and  heat  at  my  stomach,  by  reason  of  this  my  terror, 
that  I  was,  especially  at  some  times,  as  if  my  breast-bone  would  havfr 
split  asunder.  .  .  .  Thus  did  I  wind,  and  twine,  and  shrink,  undc» 


158       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

revelation;  and  although  the  immediate  feelings  passed  away, 
che  experience  has  made  me  sympathetic  with  the  morbid  feel- 
''ngs  of  others  ever  since.  It  gradually  faded,  but  for  months  I 
was  unable  to  go  out  into  the  dark  alone. 

"In  general  I  dreaded  to  be  left  alone.  I  remember  wonder- 
ing how  other  people  could  live,  how  I  myself  had  ever  lived, 
so  unconscious  of  that  pit  of  insecurity  beneath  the  surface  of 
life.  My  mother  in  particular,  a  very  cheerful  person,  seemed  to 
me  a  perfect  paradox  in  her  unconsciousness  of  danger,  which 
you  may  well  believe  I  was  very  careful  not  to  disturb  by  revela- 
tions of  my  own  state  of  mind.  I  have  always  thought  that  this 
experience  of  melancholia  of  mine  had  a  religious  bearing." 

On  asking  this  correspondent  to  explain  more  fully  what 
he  meant  by  these  'last  words,  the  answer  he  wrote  was 
I  his: — 

'I  mean  that  the  fear  was  so  invasive  and  powerful  that  if  I 
!iad  not  clung  to  scripture-texts  like  'The  eternal  God  is  my 
refuge,'  etc.,  'Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  labor  and  are  heavy- 
'aden,'  etc.,  'I  am  the  resurrection  and  the  life,'  etc.,  I  think  I 
t'hould  have  grown  really  insane."^ 

There  is  no  need  of  more  examples.  The  cases  we  have 
looked  at  are  enough.  One  of  them  gives  us  the  vanity  of 
mortal  things;  another  the  sense  of  sin;  and  the  remaining 
one  describes  the  fear  of  the  universe; — and  in  one  or  other 
of  these  three  ways  it  always  is  that  man's  original  optimism 
.'.nd  self-satisfaction  get  leveled  with  the  dust. 

In  none  of  these  cases  was  there  any  intellectual  insanity 
or  delusion  about  matters  of  fact;  but  were  we  disposed  to 
open   the   chapter  of   really   insane   melancholia,   with   its 

the  burden  that  was  upon  me;  which  burden  also  did  so  oppress 
me  that  1  could  neither  stand,  nor  go,  nor  lie,  either  at  rest  or 
quiet." 

^  For  another  case  of  fear  equally  sudden,  see  Henry  James:  So- 
'iety  the  Redeemed  Form  of  Man,  Boston,  1879,  pp.  43  fl. 


THE  SICK   SOUL  I5§: 

hallucinations  and  delusions,  it  would  be  a  worse  story 
still — desperation  absolute  and  complete,  the  whole  universe 
coagulating  about  the  sufferer  into  a  material  of  overwhelm- 
ing horror,  surrounding  him  without  opening  or  end.  Not 
the  conception  or  intellectual  perception  of  evil,  but  the 
grisly  blood-freezing  heart-palsying  sensation  of  it  close 
upon  one,  and  no  other  conception  or  sensation  able  to  live 
for  a  moment  in  its  presence.  How  irrelevantly  remote  seem 
all  our  usual  refined  optimisms  and  intellectual  and  moral 
consolations  in  presence  of  a  need  of  help  like  this!  Here  is 
the  real  core  of  the  religious  problem:  Help!  help!  No 
prophet  can  claim  to  bring  a  final  message  unless  he  says 
things  that  will  have  a  sound  of  reality  in  the  ears  of  victims 
such  as  these.  But  the  deliverance  must  come  in  as  strong  a 
form  as  the  complaint,  if  it  is  to  take  effect;  and  that  seems 
a  reason  why  the  coarser  religions,  revivalistic,  orgiastic, 
with  blood  and  miracles  and  supernatural  operations,  may 
possibly  never  be  displaced.  Some  constitutions  need  them 
too  much. 

Arrived  at  this  point,  we  can  see  how  great  an  antagonism 
may  naturally  arise  between  the  healthy-minded  way  of 
viewing  life  and  the  way  that  takes  all  this  experience  of 
evil  as  something  essential.  To  this  latter  way,  the  morbid- 
minded  way,  as  we  might  call  it,  healthy-mindedness  pure 
and  simple  seems  unspeakably  blind  and  shallow.  To  the 
healthy-minded  way,  on  the  other  hand,  the  way  of  the  sick 
soul  seems  unmanly  and  diseased.  With  their  grubbing  in 
rat-holes  instead  of  living  in  the  light;  with  their  manufac- 
ture of  fears,  and  preoccupation  with  every  unwholesome 
kind  of  misery,  there  is  something  almost  obscene  abour 
these  children  of  wrath  and  cravers  of  a  second  birth.  If  re- 
ligious mtolerance  and  hanging  and  burning  could  again 
become  the  order  of  the  day,  there  is  little  doubt  that,  how- 
ever it  may  have  been  in  the  past,  the  healthy-minded  would 


l60       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

at  present  show  themselves  the  less  indulgent  party  of  the 
two. 

In  our  own  attitude,  not  yet  abandoned,  of  impartial  on- 
lookers, what  are  we  to  say  of  this  quarrel?  It  seems  to  me 
that  we  are  bound  to  say  that  morbid-mindedness  ranges 
over  the  wider  scale  of  experience,  and  that  its  survey  is  the 
one  that  overlaps.  The  method  of  averting  one's  attention 
from  evil,  and  living  simply  in  the  light  of  good  is  splendid 
as  long  as  it  will  work.  It  will  work  with  many  persons;  it 
will  work  far  more  generally  than  most  of  us  are  ready  to 
suppose;  and  within  the  sphere  of  its  successful  operation 
there  is  nothing  to  be  said  against  it  as  a  religious  solution. 
But  it  breaks  down  impotently  as  soon  as  melancholy 
comes;  and  even  though  one  be  quite  free  from  melancholy 
one's  self,  there  is  no  doubt  that  healthy-mindedness  is  in- 
adequate as  a  philosophical  doctrine,  because  the  evil  facts 
U'hich  it  refuses  positively  to  account  for  are  a  genuine  por- 
tion of  reality;  and  they  may  after  all  be  the  best  key  to  life's 
significance,  and  possibly  the  only  openers  of  our  eyes  to  the 
deepest  levels  of  truth. 

The  normal  process  of  life  contains  moments  as  bad  as 
any  of  those  which  insane  melancholy  is  filled  with,  mo- 
ments in  which  radical  evil  gets  its  innings  and  takes  its 
solid  turn.  The  lunatic's  visions  of  horror  are  all  drawn  from 
the  material  of  daily  fact.  Our  civilization  is  founded  on  the 
shambles,  and  every  individual  existence  goes  out  in  a  lone- 
ly spasm  of  helpless  agony.  If  you  protest,  my  friend,  wait 
till  you  arrive  there  yourself!  To  believe  in  the  carnivorous 
reptiles  of  geologic  times  is  hard  for  our  imagination — they 
seem  too  much  like  mere  museum  specimens.  Yet  there  is  no 
tooth  in  any  one  of  those  museum-skulls  that  did  not  daily 
through  long  years  of  the  foretime  hold  fast  to  the  body 
struggling  in  despair  of  some  fated  living  victim.  Forms  of 
horror  just  as  dreadful  to  the  victims,  if  on  a  smaller  spatial 
scale,  fill  the  world  about  us  to-day.   Here  on  our  very 


THE   SICK   SOUL  l6l 

hearths  and  in  our  gardens  the  infernal  cat  plays  with  the 
panting  mouse,  or  holds  the  hot  bird  fluttering  in  her  jaws. 
Crocodiles  and  rattlesnakes  and  pythons  are  at  this  moment 
vessels  of  life  as  real  as  we  are;  their  loathsome  existence  fills 
every  minute  of  every  day  that  drags  its  length  along;  and 
whenever  they  or  other  wild  beasts  clutch  their  living  prey, 
the  deadly  horror  which  an  agitated  melancholiac  feels  is  the 
literally  right  reaction  on  the  situation.^ 

It  may  indeed  be  that  no  religious  reconciliation  with  the 
absolute  totality  of  things  is  possible.  Some  evils,  indeed,  are 
ministerial  to  higher  forms  of  good;  but  it  may  be  that  there 
are  forms  of  evil  so  extreme  as  to  enter  into  no  good  system 
whatsoever,  and  that,  in  respect  of  such  evil,  dumb  submis* 
sion  or  neglect  to  notice  is  the  only  practical  resource.  This 
question  must  confront  us  on  a  later  day.  But  provisionally, 
and  as  a  mere  matter  of  program  and  method,  since  the  evil 
facts  are  as  genuine  parts  of  nature  as  the  good  ones,  the 

^  Example:  "It  was  about  eleven  o'clock,  at  night  .  .  .  but  I 
strolled  on  still  with  the  people.  .  .  .  Suddenly  upon  the  left  side 
of  our  road,  a  crackling  was  heard  among  the  bushes;  all  of  us 
were  alarmed,  and  in  an  instant  a  tiger,  rushing  out  of  the  jungle, 
pounced  upon  the  one  of  the  party  that  was  foremost,  and  carried 
him  off  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye.  The  rush  of  the  animal,  and 
the  crush  of  the  poor  victim's  bones  in  his  mouth,  and  his  last  cry 
of  distress,  'Ho  hai!'  involuntarily  reechoed  by  all  of  us, -was  over 
in  three  seconds;  and  then  I  know  not  what  happened  till  I  re- 
turned to  my  senses,  when  I  found  myself  and  companions  lying 
down  on  the  ground  as  if  prepared  to  be  devoured  by  our  enemy, 
the  sovereign  of  the  forest.  I  find  my  pen  incapable  of  describing 
the  terror  of  that  dreadful  moment.  Our  limbs  stiffened,  our  power 
of  speech  ceased,  and  ojr  hearts  beat  violently,  and  only  a  whisper 
of  the  same  'Ho  hai!'  was  heard  from  us.  In  this  state  we  crept  on 
all  fours  for  some  distance  back,  and  then  ran  for  life  with  the 
speed  of  an  Arab  horse  for  about  half  an  hour,  and  fortunately  hap- 
pened to  come  to  a  small  village.  .  .  .  After  this  every  one  of  us 
was  attacked  with  fever,  attended  with  shivering,  in  which  deplor- 
able state  we  remained  ull  morning." — Autobiography  of  LutfuUah, 
a  Mohammedan  Gentleman,  Leipzig,  1857,  P-  ^^^- 


l62      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

philosophic  presumption  should  be  that  they  have  some  ra- 
tional significance,  and  that  systematic  healthy-mindedness, 
failing  as  it  does  to  accord  to  sorrow,  pain,  and  death  any 
positive  and  active  attention  whatever,  is  formally  less  com- 
plete than  systems  that  try  at  least  to  include  these  elements 
;n  their  scope. 
The  completest  religions  would  therefore  seem  to  be  those 
/  in  which  the  pessimistic  elements  are  best  developed.  Budd- 
hism, of  course,  and  Christianity  are  the  best  known  to  us  of 
these.  They  are  essentially  religions  of  deliverance:  the  man 
must  die  to  an  unreal  life  before  he  can  be  born  into  the  real 
life.  In  my  next  lecture,  I  will  try  to  discuss  some  of  the  psy- 
xhological  conditions  of  this  second  birth.  Fortunately  from 
jflow  onward  we  shall  have  to  deal  with  more  cheerful  sub- 
)'ects  than  those  which  we  have  recently  been  dwelling  on. 


Lecture  VIII 

THE   DIVIDED    SELF,    AND   THE 
PROCESS    OF    ITS    UNIFICATION 

THE  last  lecture  was  a  painful  one,  dealing  as  it  did  with 
evil  as  a  pervasive  element  of  the  world  we  live  in.  At 
the  close  of  it  we  were  brought  into  full  view  of  the  contrast 
between  the  two  ways  of  looking  at  life  which  are  character- 
istic respectively  of  what  we  called  the  healthy-minded,  who 
need  to  be  born  only  once,  and  of  the  sick  souls,  who  must 
be  twice-born  in  order  to  be  happy.  The  result  is  two  differ 
ent  conceptions  of  the  universe  of  our  experience.  In  the  re- 
ligion  of  the  once-born  the  world  is  a  sort  of  rectilinear  of 
one-storied  afifair,  whose  accounts  are  kept  in  one  denomina- 
tion, whose  parts  have  just  the  values  which  naturally  they 
appear  to  have,  and  of  which  a  simple  algebraic  sum  of 
pluses  and  minuses  will  give  the  total  worth.  Happiness  and 
religious  peace  consist  in  living  on  the  plus  side  of  the  ac- 
count. In  the  religion  of  the  twice-born,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  world  is  a  double-storied  mystery.  Peace  cannot  be 
reached  by  the  simple  addition  of  pluses  and  elimination  of 
minuses  from  life.  Natural  good  is  not  simply  insufficient  in 
amount  and  transient,  there  lurks  a  falsity  in  its  very  being. 
Cancelled  as  it  all  is  by  death  if  not  by  earlier  enemies,  it 
gives  no  final  balance,  and  can  never  be  the  thing  intended 
for  our  lasting  worship.  It  keeps  us  from  our  real  good,  rath- 
er; and  renunciation  and  despair  of  it  are  our  first  step  in 
the  direction  of  the  truth.  There  are  two  lives,  the  natural 
and  the  spiritual,  and  we  must  lose  the  one  before  we  can 
participate  in  the  other. 

163 


164       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

In  their  extreme  forms,  of  pure  naturalism  and  pure  sal- 
vationism,  the  two  types  are  violently  contrasted;  though 
here  as  in  most  other  current  classifications,  the  radical  ex- 
tremes are  somewhat  ideal  abstractions,  and  the  concrete  hu- 
man beings  whom  we  oftenest  meet  are  intermediate  vari- 
eties and  mixtures.  Practically,  however,  you  all  recognize 
the  difference:  you  understand,  for  example,  the  disdain  of 
the  methodist  convert  for  the  mere  sky-blue  healthy-minded 
moralist;  and  you  likewise  enter  into  the  aversion  of  the  lat- 
ter to  what  seems  to  him  the  diseased  subjectivism  of  the 
Methodist,  dying  to  live,  as  he  calls  it,  and  making  of  para- 
dox and  the  inversion  of  natural  appearances  the  essence  of 
God's  truth.-^ 

The  psychological  basis  of  the  twice-born  character  seems 
to  be  a  certain  discordancy  or  heterogeneity  in  the  native 
temperament  of  the  subject,  an  incompletely  unified  moral 
and  intellectual  constitution. 

"Homo  duplex,  homo  duplex!"  writes  Alphonse  Daudet. 
"The  first  time  that  I  perceived  that  I  was  two  was  at  the  death 
of  my  brother  Henri,  when  my  father  cried  out  so  dramatically. 
'He  is  dead,  he  is  dead!'  While  my  first  self  wept,  my  second  self 
thought,  'How  truly  given  was  that  cry,  how  fine  it  would  be  at 
the  theatre.'  I  was  then  fourteen  years  old. 

"This  horrible  duality  has  often  given  me  matter  for  reflec- 
tion. Oh,  this  terrible  second  me,  always  seated  whilst  ihe  other 
is  on  foot,  acting,  living,  suffering,  bestirring  itself.  This  second 
me  that  I  have  never  been  able  to  intoxicate,  to  make  shed  tears, 

^  E.g.,  "Our  young  people  are  diseased  with  the  theological  prob- 
lems of  original  sin,  origin  of  evil,  predestination,  and  the  like. 
These  never  presented  a  practical  difficulty  to  any  man — never  dark- 
ened across  any  man's  road,  who  did  not  go  out  of  his  way  to 
seek  them.  These  are  the  soul's  mumps,  and  measles,  and  whooping- 
'  oughs,"  etc.  Emerson:  "Spiritual  Laws." 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  165 

or   put  to   sleep.   And   how   it   sees   into   things,   and   how   it 
mocks!"  ^ 

Recent  works  on  the  psychology  of  character  have  haii 
much  to  say  upon  this  point."  Some  persons  are  born  with 
an  inner  constitution  which  is  harmonious  and  well  bal- 
anced from  the  outset.  Their  impulses  are  consistent  with 
one  another,  their  will  follows  without  trouble  the  guidance 
of  their  intellect,  their  passions  are  not  excessive,  and  their 
lives  are  little  haunted  by  regrets.  Others  are  oppositely  con- 
stituted;  and  are  so  in  degrees  which  may  vary  from  some- 
thing so  slight  as  to  result  in  a  merely  odd  or  whimsical  in- 
consistency, to  a  discordancy  of  which  the  consequences  may 
be  inconvenient  in  the  extreme.  Of  the  more  innocent  kinds 
of  heterogeneity  I  find  a  good  example  in  Mrs.  Annie  Be 
sant's,  autobiography. 

"I  have  ever  been  the  queerest  mixture  of  weakness  and 
strength,  and  have  paid  heavily  for  the  weakness.  As  a  child  I 
used  to  suffer  tortures  of  shyness,  and  if  my  shoe-lace  was  untied 
would  feel  shamefacedly  that  every  eye  was  fixed  on  the  un 
lucky  string;  as  a  girl  I  would  shrink  away  from  strangers  and 
think  myself  unwanted  and  unliked,  so  that  I  wa    full  of  eagei 
gratitude  to  any  one  who  noticed  me  kindly;  as  the  young  mis 
tress  of  a  house  I  was  afraid  of  my  servants,  and  would  let  care 
less  work  pass  rather  than  bear  the  pain  of  reproving  the  ill- 
doer;  when  I  have  been  lecturing  and  debating  with  no  lack  of 
spirit  on  the  platform,  I  have  preferred  to  go  without  what  I 
wanted  at  the  hotel  rather  than  to  ring  and  make  the  waiter 
fetch  it.  Combative  on  the  platform  in  defense  of  any  cause  I 
cared  for,  I  shrink  from  quarrel  or  disapproval  in  the  house, 

^  Notes  sur  la  Vie,  p.  i. 

^  See,  for  example,  F.  Paulhan,  in  his  book  Les  Caracteres,  1894 
who  contrasts  les  Equilibres,  les  Unifies,  with  les  Inquiets,  Ips  Con- 
trariants,  les  Incoherents,  les  Emiettes,  as  so  many  diverse  psychic 
types. 


l66      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

and  am  a  coward  at  heart  in  private  while  a  good  fighter  in 
public.  How  often  have  I  passed  unhappy  quarters  of  an  hour 
screwing  up  my  courage  to  find  fault  with  some  subordinate 
whom  my  duty  compelled  me  to  reprove,  and  how  often  have 
I  jeered  myself  for  a  fraud  as  the  doughty  platform  combatant, 
when  shrinking  from  blaming  some  lad  or  lass  for  doing  their 
work  badly.  An  unkind  look  or  word  has  availed  to  make  me 
shrink  into  myself  as  a  snail  into  its  shell,  while,  on  the  plat- 
form, opposition  makes  me  speak  my  best."  ^ 

This  amount  of  inconsistency  will  only  count  as  amiable 
weakness;  but  a  stronger  degree  of  heterogeneity  may  make 
havoc  of  the  subject's  life.  There  are  persons  whose  existence 
is  little  more  than  a  series  of  zig-zags,  as  now  one  tendency 
and  now  another  gets  the  upper  hand.  Their  spirit  wars 
with  their  flesh,  they  wish  for  incompatibles,  wayward  im- 
pulses interrupt  their  most  deliberate  plans,  and  their  lives 
Are  one  long  drama  of  repentance  and  of  effort  to  repair  mis- 
demeanors and  mistakes. 

Heterogeneous  personality  has  been  explained  as  the  result 
af  inheritance — the  traits  of  character  of  incompatible  and 
antagonistic  ancestors  are  supposed  to  be  preserved  along- 
side of  each  other."  This  explanation  may  pass  for. what  it  is 
worth — it  certainly  needs  corroboration.  But  whatever  the 
cause  of  heterogeneous  personality  may  be,  we  find  the  ex- 
treme examples  of  it  in  the  psychopathic  temperament,  of 
which  I  spoke  in  my  first  lecture.  All  writers  about  that  tem- 
perament make  the  inner  heterogeneity  prominent  in  their 
descriptions.  Frequently,  indeed,  it  is  only  this  trait  that 
leads  us  to  ascribe  that  temperament  to  a  man  at  all,  A  "dege- 
nere  superieur"  is  simply  a  man  of  sensibility  in  many  di- 
rections, who  finds  more  difficulty  than  is  common  in  keeping 

^  Annie  Bksant:  an  Autobiography,  p.  82. 

'  Smith  Baker,  in  Journal  of  Nervous  and  Mental  Diseases,  Sep- 
tember, 1893. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  167 

his  spiritual  house  in  order  and  running  his  furrow  straight, 
because  his  feeUngs  and  impulses  are  too  keen  and  too  dis- 
crepant mutually.  In  the  haunting  and  insistent  ideas,  in  the 
irrational  impulses,  the  morbid  scruples,  dreads,  and  inhibi- 
tions which  beset  the  psychopathic  temperament  when  it  is 
thoroughly  pronounced,  we  have  exquisite  examples  of  he- 
terogeneous personality.  Bunyan  had  an  obsession  of  the 
words,  "Sell  Christ  for  this,  sell  him  for  that,  sell  him,  sell 
him!"  which  would  run  through  his  mind  a  hundred  times 
together,  until  one  day  out  of  breath  with  retorting,  "I  will 
not,  I  will  not,"  he  impulsively  said,  "Let  him  go  if  he  will," 
and  this  loss  of  the  battle  kept  him  in  despair  for  over  a  year, 
The  lives  of  the  saints  are  full  of  such  blasphemous  obses 
sions,  ascribed  invariably  to  the  direct  agency  of  Satan.  The 
uhenomenon  connects  itself  with  the  life  of  the  subconscious 

1. 

self,    so-called,    of    which    we    must    erelong    speak    more 
directly. 

Now  in  all  of  us,  however  constituted,  but  to  a  degree  the 
greater  in  proportion  as  we  are  intense  and  sensitive  and 
subject  to  diversified  temptations,  and  to  the  greatest  possi- 
ble degree  if  we  are  decidedly  psychopathic,  does  the  normal 
evolution  of  character  chiefly  consist  in  the  straightening  ou. 
and  unifying  of  the  inner  self.  The  higher  and  the  lowei 
feelings,  the  useful  and  the  erring  impulses,  begin  by  being  a 
comparative  chaos  within  us — they  must  end  by  forming  a 
stable  system  of  functions  in  right  subordination.  Unhap- 
piness  is  apt  to  characterize  the  period  of  order-making  and 
struggle.  If  the  individual  be  of  tender  conscience  and  relig- 
iously quickened,  the  unhappiness  will  take  the  form  of 
moral  remorse  and  compunction,  of  feeling  inwardly  vile 
and  wrong,  and  of  standing  in  false  relations  to  the  author 
of  one's  being  and  appointer  of  one's  spiritual  fate.  This  is 
the  religious  melancholy  and  "conviction  of  sin"  that  have 
played  so  large  a  part  in  the  history  of  Protestant  Christian- 


l68       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ity.  The  man's  interior  is  a  battle-ground  for  what  he  feels  to 
be  two  deadly  hostile  selves,  one  actual,  the  other  ideal.  As 
Victor  Hugo  makes  his  Mahomet  say: — 

"Je  suis  le  champ  vil  des  sublimes  combats: 
Tant6t  I'homme  d'en  haut,  et  tantot  I'homme  d'en  bas; 
Et  le  mal  dans  ma  bouche  avec  le  bien  alterne, 
Comme  dans  le  desert  le  sable  et  la  citerne." 

Wrong  Hving,  impotent  aspirations;  "What  I  would,  that  do 
I  not;  but  what  I  hate,  that  do  I,"  as  Saint  Paul  says;  self- 
loathing,  self-despair;  an  unintelligible  and  intolerable  bur- 
den to  which  one  is  mysteriously  the  heir. 

Let  me  quote  from  some  typical  cases  of  discordant  per- 
sonality, with  melancholy  in  the  form  of  self-condemnation 
and  sense  of  sin.  Saint  Augustine's  case  is  a  classic  example. 
You  all  remember  his  half-pdgan,  half-Christian  bringing 
up  at  Carthage,  his  emigration  to  Rome  and  Milan,  his 
adoption  of  Manicheism  and  subsequent  skepticism,  and  his 
restless  search  for  truth  and  purity  of  life;  and  finally  how, 
distracted  by  the  struggle  between  the  two  souls  in  his  breast 
and  ashamed  of  his  own  weakness  of  will,  when  so  many 
others  whom  he  knew  and  knew  of  had  thrown  off  the 
shackles  of  sensuaUty  and  dedicated  themselves  to  chastity 
and  the  higher  life,  he  heard  a  voice  in  the  garden  say, 
"Slime,  lege"  (take  and  read),  and  opening  the  Bible  at  ran- 
dom, saw  the  text,  "not  in  chambering  and  wantonness," 
etc.,  which  seemed  directly  sent  to  his  address,  and  laid  the 
inner  storm  to  rest  forever.^  Augustine's  psychological  gen- 

^  Louis  Gourdon  (Essai  sur  la  Conversion  de  Saint  Augustine, 
Paris,  Fischbachcr,  1900)  has  shown  by  an  analysis  of  Augustine's 
writings  immediately  after  the  date  of  his  conversion  (a.  d.  386) 
that  the  account  he  gives  in  the  Confessions  is  premature.  The  crisis 
in  the  garden  marked  a  definitive  conversion  from  his  former  life, 
but  it  was  to  the  neo-platonic  spiritualism  and  only  a  halfway  stage 
toward  Christianity.  The  latter  he  appears  not  fully  and  radically  to 
have  embraced  until  four  years  more  had  passed. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  169 

ius  has  given  an  account  of  the  trouble  of  having  a  divided 
self  Vv'hich  has  never  been  surpassed. 

"The  new  will  which  I  began  to  have  was  not  yet  strong 
enough  to  overcome  that  other  will,  strengthened  by  long  in- 
dulgence. So  these  two  wills,  one  old,  one  new,  one  carnal,  the 
other  spiritual,  contended  with  each  other  and  disturbed  my 
soul.  I  understood  by  my  own  experience  what  I  had  read,  'flesh 
lusteth  against  spirit,  and  spirit  against  flesh.'  It  was  myself  in- 
deed in  both  the  wills,  yet  more  myself  in  that  which  I  approved 
in  myself  than  in  that  which  I  disapproved  in  myself.  Yet  it  was 
through  myself  that  habit  had  attained  so  fierce  a  mastery  over 
me,  because  I  had  willingly  come  whither  I  willed  not.  Still 
bound  to  earth,  I  refused,  O  God,  to  fight  on  thy  side,  as  much 
afraid  to  be  freed  from  all  bonds,  as  I  ought  to  have  feared  being 
trammeled  by  them. 

"Thus  the  thoughts  by  which  I  meditated  upon  thee  were 
like  the  efforts  of  one  who  would  awake,  but  being  overpow- 
ered with  sleepiness  is  soon  asleep  again.  Often  does  a  man 
when  heavy  sleepiness  is  on  his  limbs  defer  to  shake  it  off,  and 
though  not  approving  it,  encourage  it;  even  so  I  was  sure  it  was 
better  to  surrender  to  thy  love  than  to  yield  to  my  own  lusts,  yet, 
though  the  former  course  convinced  me,  the  latter  pleased  and 
held  me  bound.  There  was  naught  in  me  to  answer  thy  call, 
'Awake,  thou  sleeper,'  but  only  drawling,  drowsy  words,  'Pres- 
ently; yes,  presendy;  wait  a  litde  while.'  But  the  'presently'  had 
no  'present,'  and  the  'little  while'  grew  long.  .  .  .  For  I  was 
afraid  thou  wouldst  hear  me  too  soon,  and  heal  me  at  once  of 
my  disease  of  lust,  which  I  wished  to  satiate  rather  than  to  see 
extinguished.  With  what  lashes  of  words  did  I  not  scourge  my 
own  soul.  Yet  it  shrank  back;  it  refused,  though  it  had  no  ex- 
cuse to  offer.  ...  I  said  yvithin  myself:  'Come,  let  it  be  done 
now,'  and  as  I  said  it,  I  was  on  the  point  of  the  resolve.  I  all  but 
did  it,  yet  I  did  not  do  it.  And  I  made  another  effort,  and  al- 
most succeeded,  yet  I  did  not  reach  it,  and  did  not  grasp  it, 
hesitating  to  die  to  death,  and  live  to  life;  and  the  evil  to  which 
I  was  so  wonted  held  me  more  than  the  better  life  I  had  not 


tried."  1 


Cnnfessions,  Book  VIII.,  chaps,  v.,  vii.,  xi.,  abridged. 


170       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

There  could  be  no  more  perfect  description  of  the  divided 
will,  when  the  higher  wishes  lack  just  that  last  acuteness, 
that  touch  of  explosive  intensity,  of  dynamogenic  quality  (to 
use  the  slang  of  the  psychologists),  that  enables  them  to 
burst  their  shell,  and  make  irruption  efficaciously  into  life 
and  quell  the  lower  tendencies  forever.  In  a  later  lecture  we 
shall  have  much  to  say  about  this  higher  excitability. 

I  find  another  good  description  of  the  divided  will  in  the 
autobiography  of  Henry  AUine,  the  Nova  Scotian  evange- 
list, of  whose  melancholy  I  read  a  brief  account  in  my  last 
lecture.  The  poor  youth's  sins  were,  as  you  will  see,  of  the 
most  harmless  order,  yet  they  interfered  with  what  proved 
to  be  his  truest  vocation,  so  they  gave  him  great  distress. 

"I  was  now  very  moral  in  my  life,  but  found  no  rest  of  con- 
science. I  now  began  to  be  esteemed  in  young  company,  who 
knew  nothing  of  my  mind  all  this  while,  and  their  esteem  began 
to  be  a  snare  to  my  soul,  for  I  soon  began  to  be  fond  of  carnal 
mirth,  though  I  still  flattered  myself  that  if  I  did  not  get  drunk, 
nor  curse,  nor  swear,  there  would  be  no  sin  in  frolicking  and 
carnal  mirth,  and  I  thought  God  would  indulge  young  people 
with  seme  (what  I  called  simple  or  civil)  recreation.  I  still  kept 
a  round  of  duties,  and  would  not  suffer  myself  to  run  into  any 
open  vices,  and  so  got  along  very  well  in  time  of  health  and 
prosperity,  but  when  I  was  distressed  or  threatened  by  sickness, 
death,  or  heavy  storms  of  thunder,  my  religion  would  not  do, 
and  I  found  there  was  something  wanting,  and  would  begin  to 
repent  my  going  so  much  to  frolics,  but  when  the  distress  was 
over,  the  devil  and  my  own  wicked  heart,  with  the  solicitations 
of  my  associates,  and  my  fondness  for  young  company,  were 
such  strong  allurements,  I  would  again  give  way,  and  thus  I  got 
to  be  very  wild  and  rude,  at  the  same  time  kept  up  my  rounds  of 
secret  prayer  and  reading;  but  God,  not  willing  I  should  destroy 
myself,  still  followed  me  with  his  calls,  and  moved  with  such 
power  upon  my  conscience,  that  I  could  not  satisfy  myself  with 
my  diversions,  and  in  the  midst  of  my  mirth  sometimes  would 
have  such  a  sense  of  my  lost  and  undone  condition,  that  I  would 


THE   DIVIDED    SELF  I7I 

wish  myself  from  the  company,  and  after  it  was  over,  when  I 
went  home,  would  make  many  promises  that  I  would  attend  no 
more  on  these  frolics,  and  would  beg  forgiveness  for  hours  and 
hours;  but  when  I  came  to  have  the  temptation  again,  I  would 
give  way:  no  sooner  would  I  hear  the  music  and  drink  a  glass  of 
wine,  but  I  would  find  my  mind  elevated  and  soon  proceed  to 
any  sort  of  merriment  or  diversion,  that  I  thought  was  not  de- 
bauched or  openly  vicious;  but  when  I  returned  from  my  carnal 
mirth  I  felt  as  guilty  as  ever,  and  could  sometimes  not  close  my 
eyes  for  some  hours  after  I  had  gone  to  my  bed.  I  was  one  of 
the  most  unhappy  creatures  on  earth. 

"Sometimes  I  would  leave  the  company  (often  speaking  to 
the  fiddler  to  cease  from  playing,  as  if  I  was  tired),  and  go  out 
and  walk  about  crying  and  praying,  as  if  my  very  heart  would 
break,  and  beseeching  God  that  he  would  not  cut  me  off,  nor 
give  me  up  to  hardness  of  heart.  Oh,  what  unhappy  hours  and 
nights  I  thus  wore  away!  When  I  met  sometimes  with  merry 
companions,  and  my  heart  was  ready  to  sink,  I  would  labor  to 
put  on  as  cheerful  a  countenance  as  possible,  that  they  might 
not  distrust  anything,  and  sometimes  would  begin  some  dis- 
course with  young  men  or  young  women  on  purpose,  or  propose 
a  merry  song,  lest  the  distress  of  my  soul  would  be  discovered, 
or  mistrusted,  when  at  the  same  time  I  would  then  rather  have 
been  in  a  wilderness  in  exile,  than  with  them  or  any  of  their 
pleasures  or  enjoyments.  Thus  for  many  months  when  I  was 
in  company,  I  would  act  the  hypocrite  and  feign  a  merry  heart, 
but  at  the  same  time  would  endeavor  as  much  as  I  could  to  shun 
their  company,  oh  wretched  and  unhappy  mortal  that  I  was! 
Everything  I  did,  and  wherever  I  went,  I  was  still  in  a  storm, 
and  yet  I  continued  to  be  the  chief  contriver  and  ringleader  of 
the  frolics  for  many  months  after;  though  it  was  a  toil  and  tor- 
ment to  attend  them;  but  the  devil  and  my  own  wicked  heart 
drove  me  about  like  a  slave,  telling  me  that  I  must  do  this  and 
do  that,  and  bear  this  and  bear  that,  and  turn  here  and  turn 
there,  to  keep  my  credit  up,  and  retain  the  esteem  of  my  asso- 
ciates: and  all  this  while  I  continued  as  strict  as  possible  in  my 
duties,  and  left  no  stone  unturned  to  pacify  my  conscience, 
watching  even  against  my  thoughts,  and  praying  continually 


172       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

wherever  I  went:  for  I  did  not  think  there  was  any  sin  in  my 
conduct,  when  I  was  among  carnal  company,  because  I  did  not 
take  any  satisfaction  there,  but  only  followed  it,  I  thought,  for 
sufficient  reasons. 

"But  still,  all  that  I  did  or  could  do,  conscience  would  roar 
night  and  day." 

Saint  Augustine  and  Alline  both  emerged  into  the  smooth 
waters  of  inner  unity  and  peace,  and  I  shall  next  ask  you  to 
consider  more  closely  some  of  the  peculiarities  of  the  process 
of  unification,  when  it  occurs.  It  may  come  gradually,  or  it 
may  occur  abruptly;  it  may  come  through  altered  feelings, 
or  through  altered  powers  of  action;  or  it  may  come  through 
new  intellectual  insights,  or  through  experiences  which  we 
shall  later  have  to  designate  as  'mystical.'  However  it  come, 
it  brings  a  characteristic  sort  of  relief;  and  never  such  ex- 
treme relief  as  when  it  is  cast  into  the  religious  mould.  Hap- 
piness! happiness!  religion  is  only  one  of  the  ways  in  which 
men  gain  that  gift.  Easily,  permanently,  and  successfully,  it 
often  transforms  the  most  intolerable  misery  into  the  pro- 
foundest  and  most  enduring  happiness. 

But  to  find  religion  is  only  one  out  of  many  ways  of  reach- 
ing unity;  and  the  process  of  remedying  inner  incomplete- 
ness and  reducing  inner  discord  is  a  general  psychological 
process,  which  may  take  place  with  any  sort  of  mental  ma- 
terial, and  need  not  necessarily  assume  the  religious  form.  In 
judging  of  the  religious  types  of  regeneration  which  we  are 
about  to  study,  it  is  important  to  recognize  that  they  are 
only  one  species  of  a  genus  that  contains  other  types  as  well. 
For  example,  the  new  birth  may  be  away  from  religion  into 
incredulity;  or  it  may  be  from  moral  scrupulosity  into  free- 
dom and  license;  or  it  may  be  produced  by  the  irruption 
into  the  individual's  life  of  some  new  stimulus  or  passion, 
such  as  love,  ambition,  cupidity,  revenge,  or  patriotic  devo- 
uon.  In  all  these  instances  we  have  precisely  the  same  psy- 
chological form  of  event, — a  firmness,  stability,  and  equili- 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  I73 

brium  succeeding  a  period  of  storm  and  stress  and  inconsis-. 
tency.  In  these  non-religious  cases  the  new  man  may  also  be 
born  either  gradually  or  suddenly. 

The  French  philosopher  Jouffroy  has  left  an  eloquent  me- 
morial of  his  own  "counter-conversion,"  as  the  transition 
from  orthodoxy  to  infidelity  has  been  well  styled  by  Mr. 
Starbuck.  JoufTroy's  doubts  had  long  harassed  him;  but  he 
dates  his  final  crisis  from  a  certain  night  when  his  disbelief 
grew  fixed  and  stable,  and  where  the  immediate  result  was 
sadness  at  the  illusions  he  had  lost. 

"I  shall  never  forget  that  night  of  December,"  writes  Jouf- 
froy,  "in  which  the  veil  that  concealed  from  me  my  own  incred- 
ulity was  torn.  I  hear  again  my  steps  in  that  narrow  naked 
chamber  where  long  after  the  hour  of  sleep  had  come  I  had  the 
habit  of  walking  up  and  down.  I  see  again  that  moon,  half- 
veiled  by  clouds,  which  now  and  again  illuminated  the  frigid 
window-panes.  The  hours  of  the  night  flowed  on  and  I  did  not 
note  their  passage.  Anxiously  I  followed  my  thoughts,  as  from 
layer  to  layer  they  descended  towards  the  foundation  of  my 
consciousness,  and,  scattering  one  by  one  all  the  illusions  which 
until  then  had  screened  its  windings  from  my  view,  made  them 
every  moment  more  clearly  visible. 

"Vainly  I  clung  to  these  last  beliefs  as  a  shipwrecked  sailor 
clings  to  the  fragments  of  his  vessel;  vainly,  frightened  at  the 
unknown  void  in  which  I  was  about  to  float,  I  turned  with  them 
towards  my  childhood,  my  family,  my  country,  all  that  was  dear 
and  sacred  to  me:  the  inflexible  current  of  my  thought  was  too 
strong — parents,  family,  memory,  beliefs,  it  forced  me  to  let  go 
of  everything.  The  investigation  went  on  more  obstinate  and 
more  severe  as  it  drew  near  its  term,  and  did  not  stop  until  the 
end  was  reached.  I  knew  then  that  in  the  depth  of  my  mind 
nothing  was  left  that  stood  erect. 

"This  moment  was  a  frightful  one;  and  when  towards  rnorn 
ing  I  threw  myself  exhausted  on  my  bed,  I  seemed  to  feel  my 
earlier  life,  so  smiling  and  so  full,  go  out  like  a  fire,  and  before 
me  another  life  opened,  sombre  and  unpeopled,  where  in  future 
I  must  live  alone,  alone  with  my  fatal  thought  which  had  exiled 


174       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

me  thither,  and  which  I  was  tempted  to  curse.  The  days  which 
followed  this  discovery  were  the  saddest  of  my  life."  ^ 

^  Th.  Jouffroy:  Nouveaux  Melanges  philosophiques,  2me  edition, 
p.  83.  I  add  two  other  cases  of  counter-conversion  dating  from  a 
certain  moment.  The  first  is  from  Professor  Starbuck's  manuscript 
collection,  and  the  narrator  is  a  woman. 

"Away  down  in  the  bottom  of  my  heart,  I  believe  I  was  always 
more  or  less  skepdcal  about  'God;'  skepticism  grew  as  an  under- 
current, all  through  my  early  youth,  but  it  was  controlled  and  cov- 
ered  by  the  emodonal  elements  in  my  religious  growth.  When  I  was 
sixteen  I  joined  the  church  and  was  asked  if  I  loved  God.  I  replied 
'Yes,'  as  was  customary  and  expected.  But  instandy  with  a  flash 
something  spoke  within  me,  'No,  you  do  not.'  I  was  haunted  for  a 
long  time  with  shame  and  remorse  for  my  falsehood  and  for  my 
wickedness  in  not  loving  God,  mingled  with  fear  that  there  might 
be  an  avenging  God  who  would  punish  me  in  some  terrible  way. 
...  At  nineteen,  I  had  an  attack  of  tonsilids.  Before  I  had  quite 
recovered,  I  heard  told  a  story  of  a  brute  who  had  kicked  his  wife 
down-stairs,  and  then  continued  the  operadon  until  she  became  in- 
sensible. I  felt  the  horror  of  the  thing  keenly.  Instandy  this  thought 
flashed  through  my  mind:  'I  have  no  use  for  a  God  who  permits 
such  things.'  This  experience  was  followed  by  months  of  stoical  in- 
-difference  to  the  God  of  my  previous  life,  mingled  with  feelings  of 
posidve  dislike  and  a  somewhat  proud  defiance  of  him.  I  sdll  thought 
there  might  be  a  God.  If  so  he  would  probably  damn  me,  but  I  should 
have  to  stand  it.  I  felt  very  litde  fear  and  no  desire  to  propidate  him. 
I  have  never  had  any  personal  relations  with  him  since  this  painful 
experience."  •« 

The  second  case  exemplifies  how  small  an  additional  stirnulus  will 
overthrow  the  mind  into  a  new  state  of  equilibrium  when  the  process 
of  preparation  and  incubation  has  proceeded  far  enough.  It  is  like 
the  proverbial  last  straw  added  to  the  camel's  burden,  or  that  touch 
of  a  needle  which  makes  the  salt  in  a  supersaturated  fluid  suddenly 
begin  to  crystallize  out. 

Tolstoy  writes:  "S.,  a  frank  and  intelligent  man,  told  me  as  follows 
how  he  ceased  to  believe: — 

"He  was  twenty-six  years  old  when  one  day  on  a  hunting  expedi- 
tion, the  time  for  sleep  having  come,  he  set  himself  to  pray  according 
to  the  custom  he  had  held  from  childhood. 

"His  brother,  who  was  hunting  with  him,  lay  upon  the  hay  and 
looked  at  him.  When  S.  had  finished  his  prayer  and  was  turning  to 
deep,  the  brother  said,  'Do  you  still  keep  up  that  thing?'  Nothing 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  I75 

In  John  Foster's  Essay  on  Decision  of  Character,  there  is 
an  account  of  a  case  of  sudden  conversion  to  avarice,  which 
is  illustrative  enough  to  quote : — 

A  young  man,  it  appears,  "wasted,  in  two  cr  three  years,  a 
large  patrimony  in  profligate  revels  with  a  number  of  worthless 
associates  who  called  themselves  his  friends,  and  who,  when  his 
last  means  were  exhausted,  treated  him  of  course  with  neglect 
or  contempt.  Reduced  to  absolute  want,  he  one  day  went  out 
of  the  house  with  an  intention  to  put  an  end  to  his  life;  but 
wandering  awhile  almost  unconsciously,  he  came  to  the  brow  of 
an  eminence  which  overlooked  what  were  lately  his  estates. 
Here  he  sat  down,  and  remained  fixed  in  thought  a  number  of 
hours,  at  the  end  of  which  he  sprang  from  the  ground  with  a 
vehement,  exulting  emotion.  He  had  formed  his  resolution, 
which  was,  that  all  these  estates  should  be  his  again;  he  had 
formed  his  plan,  too,  which  he  instantly  began  to  execute.  He 
walked  hastily  forward,  determined  to  seize  the  first  opportu- 
nity, of  however  humble  a  kind,  to  gain  any  money,  though  it 
were  ever  so  despicable  a  trifle,  and  resolved  absolutely  not  to 
spend,  if  he  could  help  it,  a  farthing  of  whatever  he  might  ob- 
tain. The  first  thing  that  drew  his  attention  was  a  heap  of  coah 
shot  out  of  carts  on  the  pavement  before  a  house.  He  offered 
himself  to  shovel  cr  wheel  them  into  the  place  v/here  they  were 
to  be  laid,  and  was  employed.  He  received  a  few  pence  for  the 
labor;  and  then,  in  pursuance  of  the  saving  part  of  his  plan,  re- 
quested some  small  gratuity  of  meat  and  drink,  which  was  given 

more  was  said.  But  since  that  day,  nov/  more  than  thirty  years  ago, 
S.  has  never  prayed  again;  he  never  takes  communion,  and  does  not 
go  to  church.  All  this,  not  because  he  became  acquainted  with  con- 
victions of  his  brother  which  he  then  and  there  adopted;  not  be- 
cause he  made  any  new  resolution  in  his  soul,  but  merely  because 
the  words  spoken  by  his  brother  were  like  the  light  push  of  a  finger 
against  a  leaning  wall  already  about  to  tumble  by  its  own  weight. 
These  words  but  showed  him  that  the  place  wherein  he  supposed 
religion  dwelt  in  him  had  long  been  empty,  and  that  the  sentences  he 
uttered,  the  crosses  and  bows  which  he  made  during  his  prayer,  were 
actions  with  no  inner  sense.  Having  once  seized  their  absurdity,  he 
could  no  longer  keep  them  up."  Ma  Confession,  p.  8. 


176       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

him.  He  then  looked  out  for  the  next  thing  that  might  chance; 
and  went,  with  indefatigable  industry,  through  a  succession  of 
servile  employments  in  different  places,  of  longer  and  shorter 
duration,  still  scrupulous  in  avoiding,  as  far  as  possible,  the  ex- 
pense of  a  penny.  He  promptly  seized  every  opportunity  which 
could  advance  his  design,  without  regarding  the  meanness  of 
occupation  or  appearance.  By  this  method  he  had  gained,  after 
a  considerable  time,  money  enough  to  purchase  in  order  to  sell 
again  a  few  cattle,  of  which  he  had  taken  pains  to  understand 
the  value.  He  speedily  but  cautiously  turned  his  first  gains  into 
second  advantages;  retained  without  a  single  deviation  his  ex- 
treme parsimony;  and  thus  advanced  by  degrees  into  larger 
transactions  and  incipient  wealth.  I  did  not  hear,  or  have  for- 
gotten, the  continued  course  of  his  life,  but  the  final  result  was, 
that  he  more  than  recovered  his  lost  possessions,  and  died  an 
inveterate  miser,  worth  £60,000."  ^ 

I  subjoin  an  additional  document  which  has  come  into  my  posses- 
sion, and  which  represents  in  a  vivid  way  what  is  probably  a  very  fre- 
quent sort  of  conversion,  if  the  opposite  of  'falling  in  love,'  falling  out 
of  love,  may  be  so  termed.  Falling  in  love  also  conforms  frequendy  to 
this  type,  a  latent  process  of  unconscious  preparation  often  preceding 
a  sudden  awakening  to  the  fact  that  the  mischief  is  irretrievably  done. 
The  free  and  easy  tone  in  this  narradve  gives  it  a  sincerity  that  speaks 
for  itself. 

"For  two  years  of  this  time  I  went  through  a  very  bad  experience, 
which  almost  drove  me  mad.  I  had  fallen  violently  in  love  with  a 
girl  who,  young  as  she  was,  had  a  spirit  of  coquetry  like  a  cat.  As  I 
look  back  on  her  now,  I  hate  her,  and  wonder  how  I  could  ever  have 
fallen  so  low  as  to  be  worked  upon  to  such  an  extent  by  her  attractions. 
Nevertheless,  I  fell  into  a  regular  fever,  could  think  of  nothing  else; 
whenever  I  was  alone,  I  pictured  her  attractions,  and  spent  most  of 
the  time  when  I  should  have  been  working,  in  recalling  our  previous 
interviews,  and  imagining  future  conversations.  She  was  very  pretty, 
good  humored,  and  jolly  to  the  last  degree,  and  intensely  pleased 
with  my  admiration.  Would  give  me  no  decided  answer  yes  or  no, 
and  the  queer  thing  about  it  was  that  whilst  pursuing  her  for  her 
hand,  1  secredy  knew  all  along  that  she  was  unfit  to  be  a  wife  for  me, 
and  that  she  never  would  say  yes.  Although  for  a  year  we  took  our 
meals  at  the  same  boarding-house,  so  that  I  saw  her  continually  and 

^  Op.  ciL,  Letter  III.,  abridged. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  I77 

Let  me  turn  now  to  the  kind  of  case,  the  reUgious  case, 
namely,  that  immediately  concerns  us.  Here  is  one  of  the 

familiarly,  our  closer  relations  had  to  be  largely  on  the  sly,  and  thi« 
fact,  together  with  my  jealousy  of  another  one  of  her  male  admirers 
and  my  own  conscience  despising  me  for  my  uncontrollable  weakness; 
made  me  so  nervous  and  sleepless  that  I  really  tiiought  I  should  be- 
come insane.  I  undertand  well  those  young  men  murdering  their 
sweethearts,  which  appear  so  often  in  the  papers.  Nevertheless  I  did 
love  her  passionately,  and  in  some  ways  she  did  deserve  it. 

"The  queer  thing  was  the  sudden  and  unexpected  way  in  which  it 
all  stopped.  I  was  going  to  my  work  after  breakfast  one  morning, 
thinking  as  usual  of  her  and  of  my  misery,  when,  just  as  if  some  out- 
side power  laid  hold  of  me,  I  found  myself  turning  round  and  almost 
running  to  my  room,  where  I  immediately  got  out  all  the  relics  of 
her  which  I  possessed,  including  some  hair,  all  her  notes  and  letters, 
and  ambrotypes  on  glass.  The  former  I  made  a  fire  of,  the  latter  I 
actually  crushed  beneath  my  heel,  in  a  sort  of  fierce  joy  of  revenge 
and  punishment.  I  now  loathed  and  despised  her  altogether,  and  as 
for  myself  I  felt  as  if  a  load  of  disease  had  suddenly  been  removed 
from  me.  That  was  the  end.  I  never  spoke  to  her  or  wrote  to  her 
again  in  all  the  subsequent  years,  and  I  have  never  had  a  single  mo 
ment  of  loving  thought  towards  one  for  so  many  months  endrely 
filled  my  heart.  In  fact,  I  have  always  rather  hated  her  memory, 
though  now  I  can  see  that  I  had  gone  unnecessarily  far  in  that  direc- 
tion. At  any  rate,  from  that  happy  morning  onward  I  regained  pos- 
session of  my  own  proper  soul,  and  have  never  since  fallen  into  any 
similar  trap." 

This  seems  to  me  an  unusually  clear  example  of  two  different  levels 
of  personality,  inconsistent  in  their  dictates,  yet  so  well  balanced 
against  each  other  as  for  a  long  time  to  fill  the  life  v/ith  discord  and 
dissatisfaction.  At  last,  not  gradually,  but  in  a  sudden  crisis,  the  un- 
stable equilibrium  is  resolved,  and  this  happens  so  unexpectedly  that 
it  is  as  if,  to  use  the  writer's  words,  "some  outside  power  laid  hold." 

Professor  Starbuck  gives  an  analogous  case,  and  a  converse  case  of 
hatred  suddenly  turning  into  love,  in  his  Psychology  of  Religion,  p. 
141.  Compare  the  other  highly  curious  instances  which  he  gives  on 
pp.  137-144,  of  sudden  non-religious  alterations  of  habit  or  character. 
He  seems  right  in  conceiving  all  such  sudden  changes  as  results  of 
special  cerebral  functions  unconsciously  developing  until  they  are 
ready  to  play  a  controlling  part  when  they  make  irruption  into  the 
conscious  life.  When  we  treat  of  sudden  'conversion,'  I  shall  make  as 
much  use  as  I  can  of  this  hypothesis  of  subconscious  incubation. 


tyS       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

simplest  possible  type,  an  account  of  the  conversion  to  the 
rystematic  religion  of  healthy-mindedness  of  a  man  who 
must  already  have  been  naturally  of  the  healthy-minded 
type.  It  shows  how,  when  the  fruit  is  ripe,  a  touch  will  make 
it  fall. 

Mr.  Horace  Fletcher,  in  his  little  book  called  Menticul- 
ture,  relates  that  a  friend  with  whom  he  was  talking  of  the 
self-control  attained  by  the  Japanese  through  their  practice 
of  the  Buddhist  discipline  said: — 

"  'You  must  first  get  rid  of  anger  and  worry.'  'But,'  said  I, 
'is  that  possible?'  'Yes,"  replied  he;  'it  is  possible  to  the  Jap- 
anese, and  ought  to  be  possible  to  us.' 

"On  my  way  back  I  could  think  of  nothing  else  but  the  words 
get  rid,  get  rid';  and  the  idea  must  have  continued  to  possess 
me  during  my  sleeping  hours,  for  the  first  consciousness  in  the 
morning  brought  back  the  same  thought,  with  the  revelation  of 
a  discovery,  which  framed  itself  into  the  reasoning,  'If  it  is 
possible  to  get  rid  of  anger  and  worry,  why  is  it  necessary  to 
have  them  at  all?'  I  felt  the  strength  of  the  argument,  and  at 
once  accepted  the  reasoning.  The  baby  had  discovered  that  it 
could  walk.  It  would  scorn  to  creep  any  longer. 

"From  the  instant  I  realized  that  these  cancer  spots  of  worry 
and  anger  were  removable,  they  left  me.  With  the  discovery  of 
their  weakness  they  were  exorcised.  From  that  time  life  has  had 
an  entirely  different  aspect. 

"Although  from  that  moment  the  possibility  and  desirability 
of  freedom  from  the  depressing  passions  has  been  a  reality  to 
me,  it  took  me  some  months  to  feel  absolute  security  in  my  new 
position;  but,  as  the  usual  occasions  for  worry  and  anger  have 
presented  themselves  over  and  over  again,  and  I  have  been  un- 
able to  feel  them  in  the  slightest  degree,  I  no  longer  dread  or 
guard  against  them,  and  I  am  amazed  at  my  increased  energy 
and  vigor  of  mind;  at  my  strength  to  meet  situations  of  all  kinds, 
and  at  my  disposition  to  love  and  appreciate  everything. 

"I  have  had  occasion  to  travel  more  than  ten  thousand  miles 
hy  rail  since  that  morning.  The  same  Pullman  porter,  conductor, 
hotel-waiter,  peddler,  book-agent,  cabman,  and  others  who  were 


' 


THE    DIVIDED   SELF  I79 

formerly  a  source  of  annoyance  and  irritation  have  been  met, 
but  I  am  not  conscious  of  a  single  incivility.  All  at  once  the 
whole  world  has  turned  good  to  me.  I  have  become,  as  it  were, 
sensitive  only  to  the  rays  of  good. 

"I  could  recount  many  experiences  which  prove  a  brand-new 
condition  of  mind,  but  one  will  be  sufficient.  Without  the  slight 
est  feeling  of  annoyance  or  impatience,  I  have  seen  a  train  tha\ 
I  had  planned  to  take  with  a  good  deal  of  interested  and  pleas- 
urable anticipation  move  out  of  the  station  without  me,  because 
my  baggage  did  not  arrive.  The  porter  from  the  hotel  came 
running  and  panting  into  the  station  just  as  the  train  pulled  out 
of  sight.  When  he  saw  me,  he  looked  as  if  he  feared  a  scolding, 
and  began  to  tell  of  being  blocked  in  a  crowded  street  and  un- 
able to  get  out.  When  he  had  finished,  I  said  to  him:  'It  doesn't 
matter  at  all,  you  couldn't  help  it,  so  we  will  try  again  to-mor- 
row. Here  is  your  fee,  I  am  sorry  you  had  all  this  trouble  in 
earning  it.'  The  look  of  surprise  that  came  over  his  face  was  sg 
filled  with  pleasure  that  I  was  repaid  on  the  spot  for  the  delay 
in  my  departure.  Next  day  he  would  not  accept  a  cent  for  the 
service,  and  he  and  I  are  friends  for  life. 

"During  the  first  weeks  of  my  experience  I  was  on  guard 
only  against  worry  and  anger;  but,  in  the  mean  time,  having 
noticed  the  absence  of  the  other  depressing  and  dwarfing  pas 
sions,  I  began  to  trace  a  relationship,  until  I  was  convinced  that 
they  are  all  growths  from  the  two  roots  I  have  specified.  I  havt 
felt  the  freedom  now  for  so  long  a  time  that  I  am  sure  of  my 
relation  toward  it;  and  I  could  no  more  harbor  any  of  the  thiev- 
ing and  depressing  influences  that  once  I  nursed  as  a  heritage 
of  humanity  than  a  fop  would  voluntarily  wallow  in  a  filthy 
gutter. 

"There  is  no  doubt  in  my  mind  that  pure  Christianity  and 
pure  Buddhism,  and  the  Mental  Sciences  and  all  Religions, 
fundamentally  teach  what  has  been  a  discovery  to  me;  but  nons 
of  them,  have  presented  it  in  the  light  of  a  simple  and  easy 
process  of  elimination.  At  one  time  I  wondered  if  the  elimina- 
tion would  net  yield  to  indifference  and  sloth.  In  my  experience, 
the  contrary  is  the  result.  I  feel  such  an  increased  desire  to  do 
something  useful  that  it  seems  as  if  I  were  a  boy  again  and  the 
energy  for  play  had  returned.  I  could  fight  as  readily  as  (and 


l8o      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

better  than)  ever,  if  there  were  occasion  for  it.  It  does  not  make 
one  a  coward.  It  can't,  since  fear  is  one  of  the  things  eUminated. 
I  notice  the  absence  of  timidity  in  the  presence  of  any  audience. 
When  a  boy,  I  was  standing  under  a  tree  which  was  struck  by 
lightning,  and  received  a  shock  from  the  effects  of  which  I  never 
knew  exemption  until  I  had  dissolved  partnership  with  worry. 
Since  then,  lightning  and  thunder  have  been  encountered  under 
conditions  which  would  formerly  have  caused  great  depression 
and  discomfort,  without  [my]  experiencing  a  trace  of  either. 
Surprise  is  also  greatly  modified,  and  one  is  less  liable  to  become 
startled  by  unexpected  sights  or  noises. 

"As  far  as  I  am  individually  concerned,  I  am  not  bothering 
myself  at  present  as  to  what  the  results  of  this  emancipated  con- 
dition may  be.  I  have  no  doubt  that  the  perfect  health  aimed  at 
by  Christian  Science  may  be  one  of  the  possibilities,  for  I  note  a 
marked  improvement  in  the  way  my  stomach  does  its  duty  in 
assimilating  the  food  I  give  it  to  handle,  and  I  am  sure  it  works 
better  to  the  sound  of  a  song  than  under  the  friction  of  a  frown. 
Neither  am  I  wasting  any  of  this  precious  time  formulating  an 
idea  of  a  future  existence  or  a  future  Heaven.  The  Heaven  that 
I  have  within  myself  is  as  attractive  as  any  that  has  been  prom- 
ised or  that  I  can  imagine;  and  I  am  willing  to  let  the  growth 
lead  where  it  will,  as  long  as  the  anger  and  their  brood  have  no 
part  in  misguiding  it."  ^ 

The  older  medicine  used  to  speak  of  two  ways,  lysis  and 
crisis,  one  gradual,  the  other  abrupt,  in  which  one  might  re- 
cover from  a  bodily  disease.  In  the  spiritual  realm  there  are 
also  two  ways,  one  gradual,  the  other  sudden,  in  which  in- 
ner unification  may  occur.  Tolstoy  and  Bunyan  may  again 
serve  us  as  examples,  examples,  as  it  happens,  of  the  gradual 
way,  though  it  must  be  confessed  at  the  outset  that  it  is  hard 
to  follow  these  windings  of  the  hearts  of  others,  and  one 
feels  that  their  words  do  not  reveal  their  total  secret. 

Howe'er  this  be,  Tolstoy,  pursuing  his  unending  question- 

^  H.  Fletcher:  Menticulture,  or  the  A-B-C  of  True  Living,  New 
fork  and  Chicago,  1899,  pp.  26-36,  abridged. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  l8l 

ing,  seemed  to  come  to  one  insight  after  another.  First  he 
perceived  that  his  conviction  that  hfe  was  meaningless  took 
only  this  finite  life  into  account.  He  was  looking  for  the 
value  of  one  finite  term  in  that  of  another,  and  the  whole  re- 
sult could  only  be  one  of  those  indeterminate  equations  Id 
mathematics  which  end  with  0=0.  Yet  this  is  as  far  as  the 
reasoning  intellect  by  itself  can  go,  unless  irrational  senti- 
ment or  faith  brings  in  the  infinite.  Believe  in  the  infinite  as 
common  people  do,  and  life  grows  possible  again. 

"Since  mankind  has  existed,  wherever  life  has  been,  there  also 
has  been  the  faith  that  gave  the  possibility  of  living.  Faith  is  the 
sense  of  life,  that  sense  by  virtue  of  which  man  does  not  destroy 
himself,  but  continues  to  live  on.  It  is  the  force  whereby  we  live. 
If  Man  did  not  believe  that  he  must  live  for  something,  he  would 
not  live  at  all.  The  idea  of  an  infinite  God,  of  the  divinity  of  the 
soul,  of  the  union  of  men's  actions  with  God — these  are  ideas 
elaborated  in  the  infinite  secret  depths  of  human  thought.  They 
are  ideas  without  which  there  would  be  no  life,  without  which 
I  myself,"  said  Tolstoy,  "would  not  exist.  I  began  to  see  that  1 
had  no  right  to  rely  on  my  individual  reasoning  and  neglect 
these  answers  given  by  faith,  for  they  are  the  only  answers  to 
the  question." 

Yet  how  believe  as  the  common  people  believe,  steeped  as 
they  are  in  grossest  superstition.?  It  is  impossible — but  yet 
their  life!  their  life!  It  is  normal.  It  is  happy!  It  is  an  answer 
to  the  question! 

Little  by  little,  Tolstoy  came  to  the  settled  conviction — he 
says  it  took  him  two  years  to  arrive  there — that  his  trouble 
had  not  been  with  life  in  general,  not  with  the  common  life 
of  common  men,  but  with  the  life  of  the  upper,  intellectual, 
artistic  classes,  the  life  which  he  had  personally  always  led, 
the  cerebral  life,  the  life  of  conventionality,  artificiality,  and 
personal  ambition.  He  had  been  living  wrongly  and  must 
change.  To  work  for  animal  needs,  to  abjure  lies  and  van- 


l82       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ities,  to  relieve  common  wants,  to  be  simple,  to  believe  in 
God,  therein  lay  happiness  again. 

"I  remember,"  he  says,  "one  day  in  eady  spring,  I  was  alone 
in  the  forest,  lending  my  car  to  its  mysterious  noises.  I  listened, 
ind  my  thought  went  back  to  what  for  these  three  years  it  al- 
ways was  busy  with — the  quest  of  God.  But  the  idea  of  him,  I 
said,  how  did  I  ever  come  by  the  idea? 

"And  again  there  arose  in  me,  with  this  thought,  glad  aspira- 
tions towards  life.  Everything  in  me  awoke  and  received  a  mean- 
ing. .  .  .  Why  do  I  look  farther?  a  voice  within  me  asked. 
He  is  there:  he,  without  whom  one  cannot  live.  To  acknowl- 
edge God  and  to  live  are  one  and  the  same  thing.  God  is  what 
life  is.  Well,  then!  live,  seek  God,  and  there  will  be  no  life  with- 
out him.  .  .  . 

"After  this,  things  cleared  up  within  me  and  about  me  bette:' 
than  ever,  and  the  light  has  never  wholly  died  away.  I  was  saved 
from  suicide.  Just  how  or  when  the  change  took  place  I  cannot 
tell.  But  as  insensibly  and  gradually  as  the  force  of  life  had  been 
annulled  within  me.  and  I  had  reached  my  moral  death-bed, 
just  as  gradually  and  imperceptibly  did  the  energy  of  life  come 
back.  And  what  was  strange  was  that  this  energy  that  came 
back  v/as  nothing  new.  It  was  my  ancient  juvenile  force  of  faith, 
the  belief  that  the  sole  purpose  of  my  life  was  to  be  better.  I 
gave  up  the  life  of  the  conventional  world,  recognizing  it  to  be 
no  life,  but  a  parody  on  life,  which  its  superfluities  simply  keep 
us  from  comprehending," — and  Tolstoy  thereupon  embraced  the 
life  of  the  peasants,  and  has  felt  right  and  happy,  or  at  least  rela- 
tively so,  ever  since.^ 

As  I  interpret  his  melancholy,  then,  it  was  not  merely  an 
accidental  vitiation  of  his  humors,  though  it  was  doubtless 
also  that.  It  was  logically  called  for  by  the  clash  between  his 
inner  character  and  his  outer  activities  and  aims.  Although  a 
literary  artist,  Tolstoy  was  one  of  those  primitive  oaks  of 
men  to  whom  the  superfluities  and  insincerities,  the  cupid- 

■■  I  have  considerably  abridged  Tolstoy's  words  in  my  translation. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  183 

ities,  complications,  and  cruelties  q£  our  polite  civilization 
are  profoundly  unsatisfying,  and  for  whom  the  eternal  verac- 
ities lie  vv^ith  more  natural  and  animal  things.  His  crisis  was 
the  getting  of  his  soul  in  order,  the  discovery  of  its  genuine 
habitat  and  vocation,  the  escape  from  falsehoods  into  what 
for  him  were  ways  of  truth.  It  was  a  case  of  heterogeneous 
personality  tardily  and  slowly  finding  its  unity  and  level. 
And  though  not  many  of  us  can  imitate  Tolstoy,  not  having 
enough,  perhaps,  of  the  aboriginal  human  marrow  in  out 
bones,  most  of  us  may  at  least  feel  as  if  it  might  be  better  for 
us  if  we  could. 

Bunyan's  recovery  seems  to  have  been  even  slower.  For 
years  together  he  was  alternately  haunted  with  texts  ol 
Scripture,  now  up  and  now  down,  but  at  last  with  an  ever 
growing  relief  in  his  salvation  through  the  blood  of  Christ 

"My  peace  would  be  in  and  out  twenty  times  a  day;  comfort 
now  and  trouble  presently;  peace  now  and  before  I  could  go  a 
furlong  as  full  of  guilt  and  fear  as  ever  heart  could  hold."  When 
a  good  text  comes  home  to  him,  "This,"  he  writes,  "gave  me 
good  encouragement  for  the  space  of  two  or  three  hours";  or 
"This  was  a  good  day  to  me,  I  hope  I  shall  not  forget  it";  or 
"The  glory  of  these  words  was  then  so  weighty  on  me  that  I  was 
ready  to  swoon  as  I  sat;  yet,  not  with  grief  and  trouble,  but  with 
solid  joy  and  peace";  or  "This  made  a  strange  seizure  on  my 
spirit;  it  brought  light  with  it,  and  commanded  a  silence  in  my 
heart  of  all  those  tumultuous  thoughts  that  before  did  use,  like 
masterless  hell-hounds,  to  roar  and  bellow  and  make  a  hideous 
noise  within  me.  It  showed  me  that  lesus  Christ  had  not  quite 
forsaken  and  cast  off  my  Soul." 

Such  periods  accumulate  until  he  can  write:  "And  now  re- 
mained only  the  hinder  part  of  the  tempest,  for  the  thunder  was 
gone  beyond  me,  only  some  drops  would  still  remain,  that  now 
and  then  would  fall  upon  me"; — and  at  last:  "Now  did  my 
chains  fall  off  my  legs  indeed;  I  was  loosed  from  my  afflictions 
and  irons;  my  temptations  also  fled  away;  so  that  from  that 
time,  those  dreadful  Scriptures  of  God  left  off  to  trouble  me; 


184       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

now  went  I  also  home  rejoicing,  for  the  grace  and  love  of  God. 
.  .  .  Now  could  I  see  myself  in  Heaven  and  Earth  at  once;  in 
Heaven  by  my  Christ,  by  my  Head,  by  my  Righteousness  and 
Life,  though  on  Earth  by  my  body  or  person.  .  .  .  Christ  was 
a  precious  Christ  to  my  soul  that  night;  I  could  scarce  lie  in  my 
bed  for  joy  and  peace  and  triumph  through  Christ." 

Bunyan  became  a  minister  of  the  gospel,  and  in  spite  of 
his  neurotic  constitution,  and  of  the  twelve  years  he  lay 
in  prison  for  his  non-conformity,  his  life  was  turned  to  ac- 
tive use.  He  was  a  peacemaker  and  doer  of  good,  and  the 
immortal  Allegory  which  he  wrote  has  brought  the  very 
spirit  of  religious  patience  home  to  English  hearts. 

But  neither  Bunyan  nor  Tolstoy  could  become  what  we 
have  called  healthy-minded.  They  had  drunk  too  deeply  of 
the  cup  of  bitterness  ever  to  forget  its  taste,  and  their  re- 
demption is  into  a  universe  two  stories  deep.  Each  of  them 
realized  a  good  which  broke  the  effective  edge  of  his  sad- 
ness; yet  the  sadness  was  preserved  as  a  minor  ingredient  in 
the  heart  of  the  faith  by  which  it  was  overcome.  The  fact  of 
interest  for  us  is  that  as  a  matter  of  fact  they  could  and  did 
find  something  welling  up  in  the  inner  reaches  of  their  con- 
sciousness, by  which  such  extreme  sadness  could  be  over- 
come. Tolstoy  does  well  to  talk  of  it  as  that  by  which  men 
live;  for  that  is  exactly  what  it  is,  a  stimulus,  an  excitement, 
a  faith,  a  force  that  re-infuses  the  positive  willingness  to  live, 
even  in  full  presence  of  the  evil  perceptions  that  erewhile 
made  life  seem  unbearable.  For  Tolstoy's  perceptions  of  evil 
appear  within  their  sphere  to  have  remained  unmodified. 
His  later  works  show  him  implacable  to  the  whole  system  of 
official  values:  the  ignobility  of  fashionable  life;  the  infamies 
of  empire;  the  spuriousness  of  the  church,  the  vain  conceit 
of  the  professions;  the  meannesses  and  cruelties  that  go  with 
great  success;  and  every  other  pompous  crime  and  lying  in- 
stitution of  this  world.  To  all  patience  with  such  things  his 
experience  has  been  for  him  a  permanent  ministry  of  death. 


THE   DIVIDED   SELF  185 

Bunyan  also  leaves  this  world  to  the  enemy. 

"I  must  first  pass  a  sentence  of  death,"  he  says,  "upon  every- 
thing that  can  properly  be  called  a  thing  of  this  life,  even  to 
reckon  myself,  my  wife,  my  children,  my  health,  my  enjoyments, 
and  all,  as  dead  to  me,  and  myself  as  dead  to  them;  to  trust  in 
God  through  Christ,  as  touching  the  world  to  come;  and  as 
touching  this  world,  to  count  the  grave  my  house,  to  make  my 
bed  in  darkness,  and  to  say  to  corruption.  Thou  art  my  father, 
and  to  the  worm.  Thou  art  my  mother  and  sister.  .  .  .  The 
parting  with  my  wife  and  my  poor  children  hath  often  been  to 
me  as  the  pulling  of  my  flesh  from  my  bones,  especially  my  poor 
blind  child  who  lay  nearer  my  heart  than  all  I  had  besides.  Poor 
child,  thought  I,  what  sorrow  art  thou  like  to  have  for  thy  por- 
tion in  this  world!  Thou  must  be  beaten,  must  beg,  suflfer 
hunger,  cold,  nakedness,  and  a  thousand  calamities,  though  1. 
cannot  now  endure  that  the  wind  should  blow  upon  thee.  But 
yet  I  must  venture  you  all  with  God,  though  it  goeth  to  the 
cjuick  to  leave  you."  ^ 

The  "hue  of  resolution"  is  there,  but  the  full  flood  of  ecs- 
tatic liberation  seems  never  to  have  poured  over  poor  John 
Bunyan's  soul. 

These  examples  may  suffice  to  acquaint  us  in  a  general 
way  with  the  phenomenon  technically  called  "Conversion." 
In  the  next  lecture  I  shall  invite  you  to  study  its  peculiarities 
and  concomitants  in  some  detail. 

1  In  my  quotations  from  Bunyan  I  have  omitted  certain  intervening 
portions  of  the  text 


Lecture  IX 
CONVERSION 

TO  be  converted,  to  be  regenerated,  to  receive  grace,  to 
experience  religion,  to  gain  an  assurance,  are  so  many 
phrases  which  denote  the  process,  gradual  or  sudden,  by 
which  a  self  hitherto  divided,  and  consciously  wrong  infer- 
ior and  unhappy,  becomes  unified  and  consciously  right  su- 
perior and  happy,  in  consequence  of  its  firmer  hold  upon  re- 
ligious realities.  This  at  least  is  what  conversion  signifies  in 
general  terms,  whether  or  not  we  believe  that  a  direct  divine 
operation  is  needed  to  bring  such  a  moral  change  about. 

Before  entering  upon  a  minuter  study  of  the  process,  let 
me  enliven  our  understanding  of  the  definition  by  a  con- 
crete example.  I  choose  the  quaint  case  of  an  unlettered  man, 
Stephen  H.  Bradley,  whose  experience  is  related  in  a  scarce 
American  pamphlet.^ 

I  select  this  case  because  it  shows  how  in  these  inner  alter- 
ations one  may  find  one  unsuspected  depth  below  another, 
as  if  the  possibilities  of  character  lay  disposed  in  a  series  of 
layers  or  shells,  of  whose  existence  we  have  no  premonitory 
knowledge. 

Bradley  thought  that  he  had  been  already  fully  converted 
at  the  age  of  fourteen. 

"I  thought  I  saw  the  Saviour,  by  faith,  in  human  shape,  for 
ihout  one  second  in  the  room,  with  arms  extended,  appearing  to 

1  A  sketch  of  the  Ufe  of  Stephen  H.  Bradley,  from  the  age  of  fi\e  to 
twenty-four  years,  including  his  remarkable  experience  of  the  power 
of  the  Holy  Spirit  on  the  second  evening  of  November,  1829.  Mad- 
ison, Connecticut,  1830. 

186 


CONVERSION  187 

say  to  me,  Come.  The  next  day  I  rejoiced  with  trembUng;  soon 
after,  my  happiness  was  so  great  that  I  said  that  I  wanted  to 
die;  this  world  had  no  place  in  my  affections,  as  I  knew  of,  and 
every  day  appeared  as  solemn  to  me  as  the  Sabbath.  I  had  an 
ardent  desire  that  all  mankind  might  feel  as  I  did;  I  wanted  to 
have  them  all  love  God  supremely.  Previous  to  this  time  I  was 
very  selfisli  and  self-righteous;  but  now  I  desired  the  welfare  ot 
all  mankind,  and  could  with  a  feeling  heart  forgive  my  worst 
enemies,  and  I  felt  as  if  I  should  be  willing  to  bear  the  scoff? 
and  sneers  of  any  person,  and  suffer  anything  for  His  sake,  if 
I  could  be  the  means  in  the  hands  of  God,  of  the  conversion  of 
one  soul." 

Nine  years  later,  in  1829,  Mr.  Bradley  heard  of  a  revival  of 
religion  that  had  begun  in  his  neighborhood.  "Many  of  the 
young  converts,"  he  says,  "would  come  to  me  when  in  meeting 
and  ask  me  if  I  had  religion,  and  my  reply  generally  was,  I  hope 
I  have.  This  did  not  appear  to  satisfy  them;  they  said  they  J{new 
they  had  it.  I  requested  them  to  pray  for  me,  thinking  with  my- 
self, that  if  I  had  not  got  religion  now,  after  so  long  a  time  pro- 
fessing to  be  a  Christian,  that  it  was  time  I  had,  and  hoped  their 
prayers  would  be  answered  in  my  behalf. 

"One  Sabbath,  I  went  to  hear  the  Methodist  at  the  Acad- 
emy.' He  spoke  of  the  ushering  in  of  the  day  of  general  judg 
ment;  and  he  set  it  forth  in  such  a  solemn  and  terrible  mannei 
as  I  never  heard  before.  The  scene  of  that  day  appeared  to  be 
taking  place,  and  so  awakened  were  all  the  powers  of  my  mind 
that,  like  Felix,  I  trembled  involuntarily  on  the  bench  where  I 
was  sitting,  though  I  felt  nothing  at  heart.  The  next  day  even- 
ing I  went  to  hear  him  again.  He  took  his  text  from  Revelation: 
'And  I  saw  the  dead,  small  and  great,  stand  before  God.'  And 
he  represented  the  terrors  of  that  day  in  such  a  manner  that  it 
appeared  as  if  it  would  melt  the  heart  of  stone.  When  he  fin- 
ished his  discourse,  an  old  gentleman  turned  to  me  and  said, 
'This  is  what  I  call  preaching.'  I  thought  the  same;  but  my  feel- 
ings were  still  unmoved  by  what  he  said,  and  I  did  not  enjoy 
religion,  but  I  believe  he  did. 

"I  will  now  relate  my  experience  of  the  power  of  the  HoJy 
Spirit  which  took  place  on  the  same  night.  Had  any  person  told 


l88       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

me  previous  to  this  that  I  could  have  experienced  the  power  of 
the  Holy  Spirit  in  the  manner  which  I  did,  I  could  not  have  be- 
lieved it,  and  should  have  thought  the  person  deluded  that  told 
me  so.  I  went  directly  home  after  the  meeting,  and  when  I  got 
home  I  wondered  what  made  me  feel  so  stupid.  I  retired  to  rest 
soon  after  I  got  home,  and  felt  indifferent  to  the  things  of  re- 
ligion until  I  began  to  be  exercised  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  which 
began  in  about  five  minutes  after,  in  the  following  manner: — 
"At  first,  I  began  to  feel  my  heart  beat  very  quick  all  on  a 
sudden,  which  made  me  at  first  think  that  perhaps  something  is 
going  to  ail  me,  though  I  was  not  alarmed,  for  I  felt  no  pain. 
My  heart  increased  in  its  beating,  which  soon  convinced  me 
that  it  was  the  Holy  Spirit  from  the  effect  it  had  on  me.  I  began 
to  feel  exceedingly  happy  and  humble,  and  such  a  sense  of  un- 
worthiness  as  I  never  felt  before.  I  could  not  very  well  help 
speaking  out,  v/hich  I  did,  and  said.  Lord,  I  do  not  deserve  this 
happiness,  or  words  to  that  effect,  while  there  was  a  stream  (re- 
sembling air  in  feeling)  came  into  my  mouth  and  heart  in  a 
more  sensible  manner  than  that  of  drinking  anything,  which 
continued,  as  near  as  I  could  judge,  five  minutes  or  more,  which 
appeared  to  be  the  cause  of  such  a  palpitation  of  my  heart.  It 
took  complete  possession  of  my  soul,  and  I  am  certain  that  I 
desired  the  Lord,  while  in  the  midst  of  it,  not  to  give  me  any 
more  happiness,  for  it  seemed  as  if  I  could  not  contain  what  I 
had  got.  My  heart  seemed  as  if  it  would  burst,  but  it  did  not 
stop  until  I  felt  as  if  I  was  unutterably  full  of  the  love  and  grace 
of  God.  In  the  mean  time  while  thus  exercised,  a  thought  arose 
in  my  mind,  what  can  it  mean?  and  all  at  once,  as  if  to  answer 
it,  my  memory  became  exceedingly  clear,  and  it  appeared  to  me 
just  as  if  the  New  Testament  was  placed  open  before  me,  eighth 
chapter  of  Romans,  and  as  light  as  if  some  candle  lighted  was 
held  for  me  to  read  the  26th  and  27th  verses  of  that  chapter, 
and  I  read  these  words:  'The  Spirit  helpeth  our  infirmities  with 
groanings  which  cannot  be  uttered.'  And  all  the  time  that  my 
heart  was  a-beating,  it  made  me  groan  like  a  person  in  distress, 
which  was  not  very  easy  to  stop,  though  I  was  in  no  pain  at  all, 
and  my  brother  being  in  bed  in  another  room  came  and  opened 
the  door,  and  asked  me  if  I  had  got  the  toothache.  I  told  him  no. 


CONVERSION  l8^ 

and  that  he  might  get  to  sleep.  I  tried  to  stop.  I  felt  unwilling  to 
go  to  sleep  myself,  I  was  so  happy,  fearing  I  should  lose  it — 
thinking  within  myself 

'My  willing  soul  would  stay 
In  such  a  frame  as  this.' 

And  while  I  lay  reflecting,  after  my  heart  stopped  beating,  feel- 
ing as  if  my  soul  was  full  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  I  thought  that  per- 
haps there  might  be  angels  hovering  round  my  bed.  I  felt  just 
as  if  I  wanted  to  converse  with  them,  and  finally  I  spoke,  saying, 
'O  ye  affectionate  angels!  how  is  it  that  ye  can  take  so  much  in- 
terest in  our  welfare,  and  we  take  so  little  interest  in  our  own.' 
After  this,  with  difficulty  I  got  to  sleep;  and  when  I  awoke  in 
the  morning  my  first  thoughts  were:  What  has  become  of  my 
happiness.?  and,  feeling  a  degree  of  it  in  my  heart,  I  asked  foi 
more,  which  was  given  to  me  as  quick  as  thought.  I  then  gol 
up  to  dress  myself,  and  found  to  my  surprise  that  I  could  but 
iust  stand.  It  appeared  to  me  as  if  it  was  a  little  heaven  upon 
earth.  My  soul  felt  as  completely  raised  above  the  fears  of  death 
ris  of  going  to  sleep;  and  like  a  bird  in  a  cage,  I  had  a  desire,  if 
it  was  the  will  of  God,  to  get  released  from  my  body  and  tc 
dwell  with  Christ,  though  willing  to  live  to  do  good  to  others. 
:ind  to  warn  sinners  to  repent.  I  went  downstairs  feeling  a; 
r-c!emn  as  if  I  had  lost  all  my  friends,  and  thinking  with  myself, 
that  I  would  not  let  my  parents  know  it  until  I  had  first  looked 
into  the  Testament.  I  went  directly  to  the  shelf  and  looked  into 
it,  at  the  eighth  of  Romans,  and  every  verse  seemed  to  almost 
speak  and  to  confirm  it  to  be  truly  the  Word  of  God,  and  as  if 
my  feelings  corresponded  with  the  meaning  of  the  word.  I 
then  told  my  parents  of  it,  and  told  them  that  I  thought  that 
they  must  see  that  when  I  spoke,  that  it  was  not  my  own  voice, 
for  it  appeared  so  to  me.  My  speech  seemed  entirely  under  the 
control  of  the  Spirit  within  me;  I  do  not  mean  that  the  words 
which  I  spoke  were  not  my  own,  for  they  were.  I  thought  that 
I  was  influenced  similar  to  the  Apostles  on  the  day  of  Pentecost 
(with  the  exception  of  having  power  to  give  it  to  others,  and  do- 
ing what  they  did).  After  Ix-eakfast  I  went  round  to  converse 
with  my  neighbors  on  religion,  which  I  could  not  have  been 


190      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hired  to  have  done  before  this,  and  at  their  request  I  prayed 
with  them,  though  I  had  never  prayed  in  pubUc  before. 

"I  nov\^  feel  as  if  I  had  discharged  my  duty  by  teUing  the  truth, 
and  hope  by  the  blessing  of  God,  it  may  do  some  good  to  all  who 
shall  read  it.  He  has  fulfilled  his  promise  in  sending  the  Holy 
Spirit  down  into  our  hearts,  or  mine  at  least,  and  I  now  defy  all 
the  Deists  and  Atheists  in  the  world  to  shake  my  faith  in 
Christ." 

So  much  for  Mr.  Bradley  and  his  conversion,  of  the  eflect 
of  which  upon  his  later  life  we  gain  no  information.  Now 
for  a  minuter  survey  of  the  constituent  elements  of  the  con- 
version process. 

If  you  open  the  chapter  on  Association,  of  any  treatise  on 
Psychology,  you  will  read  that  a  man's  ideas,  aims,  and  ob- 
jects form  diverse  internal  groups  and  systems,  relatively  in- 
dependent of  one  another.  Each  'aim'  which  he  follows 
awakens  a  certain  specific  kind  of  interested  excitement,  and 
gathers  a  certain  group  of  ideas  together  in  subordination  to 
it  as  its  associates;  and  if  the  aims  and  excitemients  are  dis- 
tinct in  kind,  their  groups  of  ideas  may  have  little  in  com- 
mon. When  one  group  is  present  and  engrosses  the  interest, 
all  the  ideas  connected  with  other  groups  may  be  excluded 
from  the  mental  field.  The  President  of  the  United  States 
when,  with  paddle,  gun,  and  fishing-rod,  he  goes  camping 
in  the  wilderness  for  a  vacation,  changes  his  system  of  ideas 
from  top  to  bottom.  The  presidential  anxieties  have  lapsed 
into  the  background  entirely;  the  official  habits  are  replaced 
by  the  habits  of  a  son  of  nature,  and  those  who  knew  the 
man  only  as  the  strenuous  magistrate  would  not  "know  him 
for  the  same  person"  if  they  saw  him  as  the  camper. 

If  now  he  should  never  go  back,  and  never  again  sufifer 
political  interests  to  gain  dominion  over  him,  he  would  be 
lor  practical  intents  and  purposes  a  permanently  trans- 
formed being.  Our  ordinary  alterations  of  character,  as  we 


CONVERSION  191 

pass  from  one  of  our  aims  to  another,  are  not  commonly 
called  transformations,  because  each  of  them  is  so  rapidly 
succeeded  by  another  in  the  reverse  direction;  but  whenever 
one  aim  grows  so  stable  as  to  expel  definitively  its  previous 
rivals  from  the  individual's  life,  we  tend  to  speak  of  the 
phenomenon,  and  perhaps  to  wonder  at  it,  as  a  "transfor- 
mation." 

These  alternations  are  the  completes!  of  the  ways  in  which 
a  self  may  be  divided.  A  less  complete  way  is  the  simultan- 
eous coexistence  of  two  or  more  different  groups  of  aims,  of 
which  one  practically  holds  the  right  of  way  and  instigates 
activity,  whilst  the  others  are  only  pious  wishes,  and  never 
practically  come  to  anything.  Saint  Augustine's  aspirations 
to  a  purer  life,  in  our  last  lecture,  were  for  a  while  an  exam- 
ple. Another  would  be  the  President  in  his  full  pride  of  of- 
fice, wondering  whether  it  were  not  all  vanity,  and  whether 
the  life  of  a  wood-chopper  were  not  the  wholesomer  destiny. 
Such  fleeting  aspirations  are  mere  velleitates,  whimsies. 
They  exist  on  the  remoter  outskirts  of  the  mind,  and  the 
real  self  of  the  man,  the  centre  of  his  energies,  is  occupied 
with  an  entirely  different  system.  As  life  goes  on,  there  is  a 
constant  change  of  our  interests,  and  a  consequent  change  of 
place  in  our  systems  of  ideas,  from  more  central  to  more 
peripheral,  and  from  more  peripheral  to  more  central  parts 
of  consciousness.  I  remember,  for  instance,  that  one  evening 
when  I  was  a  youth,  my  father  read  aloud  from  a  Boston 
newspaper  that  part  of  Lord  Gifford's  will  which  founded 
these  four  lectureships.  At  that  time  I  did  not  think  of  being 
a  teacher  of  philosophy,  and  .what  I  listened  to  was  as  remot& 
from  my  own  life  as  if  it  related  to  the  planet  Mars.  Yet  here 
I  am,  with  the  Gifford  system  part  and  parcel  of  my  very 
self,  and  all  my  energies,  for  the  time  being,  devoted  to  suc- 
cessfully identifying  myself  with  it.  My  soul  stands  now 
planted  in  what  once  was  for  it  a  practically  unreal  object, 
and  speaks  from  it  as  from  its  proper  habitat  and  centre. 


102       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

When  I  say  "Soul,"  you  need  not  take  me  in  the  ontolog- 
ical  sense  unless  you  prefer  to;  for  although  ontological  lan- 
guage is  instinctive  in  such  matters,  yet  Buddhists  or  Hu- 
mians  can  perfecdy  well  describe  the  facts  in  the  phenome- 
nal terms  which  are  their  favorites.  For  them  the  soul  is  only 
a  succession  of  fields  of  consciousness:  yet  there  is  found  in 
each  field  a  part,  or  sub-field,  which  figures  as  focal  and  con- 
tains the  excitement,  and  from  which,  as  from  a  centre,  the 
aim  seems  to  be  taken.  Talking  of  this  part,  we  involuntarily 
apply  words  of  perspective  to  distinguish  it  from  the  rest, 
words  like  here,  this,  now,  mine,  or  me  ;  and  we 
ascribe  to  the  other  parts  the  positions  "there,"  "then," 
"that,"  "his"  or  "thine,"  "it,"  "not  me."  But  a  "here"  can 
change  to  a  "there,"  and  a  "there"  become  a  "here,"  and 
what  was  "mine"  and  what  was  "not  mine"  change  their 
places. 

What  brings  such  changes  about  is  the  way  in  which  emo- 
tional excitement  alters.  Things  hot  and  vital  to  us  to-day 
are  cold  to-morrow.  It  is  as  if  seen  from  the  hot  parts  of  the 
field  that  the  other  parts  appear  to  us,  and  from  these  hot 
parts  personal  desire  and  volition  make  their  sallies.  They 
are  in  short  the  centres  of  our  dynamic  energy,  whereas  the 
cold  parts  leave  us  indifferent  and  passive  in  proportion  to 
their  coldness. 

Whether  such  language  be  rigorously  exact  is  for  the  pres- 
ent of  no  importance.  It  is  exact  enough,  if  you  recognize 
from  your  own  experience  the  facts  which  I  seek  to  desig- 
nate by  it. 

Now  there  may  be  great  oscillation  in  the  emotional  in- 
terest, and  the  hot  places  may  shift  before  one  almost  as  rap- 
idly as  the  sparks  that  run  through  burnt-up  paper.  Then 
we  have  the  wavering  and  divided  self  we  heard  so  much  of 
in  the  previous  lecture.  Or  the  focus  of  excitement  and  heat, 
the  point  of  view  from  which  the  aim  is  taken,  may  come  to 
lie  permanently  within  a  certain  system;  and  then,  if  the 


CONVERSION  193 

change  be  a  religious  one,  we  call  it  a  conversion,  especially 
if  it  be  by  crisis,  or  sudden. 

Let  us  hereafter,  in  speaking  of  the  hot  place  in  a  man's 
consciousness,  the  group  of  ideas  to  which  he  devotes  him- 
self, and  from  which  he  works,  call  it  the  habitual  centre  of 
his  personal  energy.  It  makes  a  great  diflference  to  a  man 
whether  one  set  of  his  ideas,  or  another,  be  the  centre  of  his 
energy;  and  it  makes  a  great  difference,  as  regards  any  set  of 
ideas  which  he  may  possess,  whether  they  become  central  or 
remain  peripheral  in  him.  To  say  that  a  man  is  "converted" 
means,  in  these  terms,  that  religious  ideas,  previously  peri- 
pheral in  his  consciousness,  now  take  a  central  place,  and 
that  religious  aims  form  the  habitual  centre  of  his  energy. 

Now  if  you  ask  of  psychology  just  how  the  excitement 
shifts  in  a  man's  mental  system,  and  why  aims  that  were 
peripheral  become  at  a  certain  moment  central,  psychology 
has  to  reply  that  although  she  can  give  a  general  description 
of  what  happens,  she  is  unable  in  a  given  case  to  account  ac- 
curately for  all  the  single  forces  at  work.  Neither  an  outside 
observer  nor  the  Subject  who  undergoes  the  process  can  ex- 
plain fully  how  particular  experiences  are  able  to  change 
one's  centre  of  energy  so  decisively,  or  why  they  so  often 
have  to  bide  their  hour  to  do  so.  We  have  a  thought,  or  we 
perform  an  act,  repeatedly,  but  on  a  certain  day  the  real 
meaning  of  the  thought  peals  through  us  for  the  first  time, 
or  the  act  has  suddenly  turned  into  a  moral  impossibility. 
All  we  know  is  that  there  are  dead  feelings,  dead  ideas,  and 
cold  beliefs,  and  there  are  hot  and  live  ones;  and  when  one 
grows  hot  and  alive  within  us,  everything  has  to  re-crystal- 
hze  about  it.  We  may  say  that  the  heat  and  liveliness  mean 
only  the  "motor  efficacy,"  long  deferred  but  now  operative, 
of  the  idea;  but  such  talk  itself  is  only  circumlocution,  for 
whence  the  sudden  motor  efficacy?  And  our  explanations 
then  get  so  vague  and  general  that  one  realizes  all  the  mort' 
the  intense  individuality  of  the  whole  phenomenon. 


194       '^^^  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

In  the  end  we  fall  back  on  the  hackneyed  symbolism  of  a 
mechanical  equilibrium.  A  mind  is  a  system  of  ideas,  each 
with  the  excitement  it  arouses,  and  with  tendencies  impul- 
sive and  inhibitive,  which  mutually  check  or  reinforce  one 
another.  The  collection  of  ideas  alters  by  subtraction  or  by 
addition  in  the  course  of  experience,  and  the  tendencies  alter 
vis  the  organism  gets  more  aged.  A  mental  system  may  be 
iindermined  or  weakened  by  this  interstitial  alteration  just 
iS  a  building  is,  and  yet  for  a  time  keep  upright  by  dead 
habit.  But  a  new  perception,  a  sudden  emotional  shock,  or 
an  occasion  which  lays  bare  the  organic  alteration,  will  make 
the  whole  fabric  fall  together;  and  then  the  centre  of  gravity 
sinks  into  an  attitude  more  stable,  for  the  new  ideas  that 
reach  the  centre  in  the  rearrangement  seem  now  to  be 
locked  there,  and  the  new  structure  remains  permanent. 

Formed  associations  of  ideas  and  habits  are  usually  factors 
Lif  retardation  in  such  changes  of  equilibrium.  New  infor- 
mation, however  acquired,  plays  an  accelerating  part  in  the 
changes;  and  the  slow  mutation  of  our  instincts  and  propen- 
sities, under  the  "unimaginable  touch  of  time"  has  an  enor- 
mous influence.  Moreover,  all  these  influences  may  work 
subconsciously  or  half  unconsciously.^  And  when  you  get  a 
Subject  in  whom  the  subconscious  life — of  which  I  must 
speak  more  fully  soon — is  largely  developed,  and  in  whom 

^Jouffroy  is  an  example:  "Down  this  slope  it  was  that  my  intel- 
ligence had  glided,  and  litde  by  little  it  had  got  far  from  its  first 
faith.  But  this  melancholy  revoludon  had  not  taken  place  in  the 
broad  daylight  of  my  consciousness;  too  many  scruples,  too  many 
guides  and  sacred  affecdons  had  made  it  dreadful  to  me,  so  diat  I 
was  far  from  avowing  to  myself  the  progress  it  had  made.  It  had 
gone  on  in  silence,  by  an  involuntary  elaboradon  of  which  I  was 
not  the  accomplice;  and  although  I  had  in  reality  long  ceased  to 
be  a  Christian,  yet,  in  the  innocence  of  my  intention,  I  should  have 
shuddered  to  suspect  it,  and  thought  it  calumnv  had  I  been  accused 
of  such  a  falling  away."  Then  follows  Jouffroy's  account  of  his 
counter-conversion,  quoted  above  on  p.  173. 


CONVERSION  195 

motives  habitually  ripen  in  silence,  you  get  a  case  of  which 
you  can  never  give  a  full  account,  and  in  which,  both  to  the 
Subject  and  the  onlookers,  there  may  appear  an  element  of 
marvel.  Emotional  occasions,  especially  violent  ones,  are  ex- 
tremely potent  in  precipitating  mental  rearrangements.  The 
sudden  and  explosive  ways  in  which  love,  jealousy,  guilt, 
fear,  remorse,  or  anger  can  seize  upon  one  are  known  to 
everybody.^  Hope,  happiness,  security,  resolve,  emotions 
characteristic  of  conversion,  can  be  equally  explosive.  And 
emotions  that  come  in  this  explosive  way  seldom  leave 
things  as  they  found  them. 

In  his  recent  work  on  the  Psychology  of  Religion,  Profes- 
sor Starbuck  of  California  has  shown  by  a  statistical  inquiry 
how  closely  parallel  in  its  manifestations  the  ordinary  "con- 
version" which  occurs  in  young  people  brought  up  in  evan- 
gelical circles  is  to  that  growth  into  a  larger  spiritual  life 
which  is  a  normal  phase  of  adolescence  in  every  class  of  hu- 
man beings.  The  age  is  the  same,  falling  usually  between 
fourteen  and  seventeen.  The  symptoms  are  the  same, — sense 
of  incompleteness  and  imperfection;  brooding,  depression, 
morbid  introspection,  and  sense  of  sin;  anxiety  about  the 
hereafter;  distress  over  doubts,  and  the  like.  And  the  result 
is  the  same — a  happy  relief  and  objectivity,  as  the  confidence 
in  self  gets  greater  through  the  adjustment  of  the  faculties  to 

^  One  hardly  needs  examples;  but  for  love,  see  p.  176,  note;  for 
fear,  p.  161;  for  remorse,  see  Othello  after  the  murder;  for  anger, 
see  Lear  after  Cordelia's  first  speech  to  him;  for  resolve,  see  p.  175 
(J.  Foster  case).  Here  is  a  pathological  case  in  which  guilt  was  the 
feeling  that  suddenly  exploded:  "One  night  I  was  seized  on  enter- 
ing bed  with  a  rigor,  such  as  Swedenborg  describes  as  coming  over 
him  with  a  sense  of  holiness,  but  over  me  with  a  sense  of  guilt. 
During  that  whole  night  I  lay  under  the  influnce  of  the  rigor,  and 
from  its  incepdon  I  felt  that  I  was  under  the  curse  of  God.  I  have 
never  done  one  act  of  duty  in  my  life — sins  against  God  and  man, 
beginning  as  far  as  my  memory  goes  back — a  wildcat  in  human 
shape." 


196      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

the  wider  outlook.  In  spontaneous  religious  awakening, 
apart  from  rcvivalistic  examples,  and  in  the  ordinary  storm 
and  stress  and  moulting-time  of  adolescence,  we  also  may 
meet  with  mystical  experiences,  astonishing  the  subjects  by 
their  suddenness,  just  as  in  rcvivalistic  conversion.  The  anal- 
ogy, in  fact,  is  complete;  and  Starbuck's  conclusion  as  to 
these  ordinary  youthful  conversions  would  seem  to  be  the 
only  sound  one:  Conversion  is  in  its  essence  a  normal  ado- 
lescent phenomenon,  incidental  to  the  passage  from  the 
child's  small  universe  to  the  wider  intellectual  and  spiritual 
life  of  maturity. 

"Theology,"  says  Dr.  Starbuck,  "takes  the  adolescent  ten- 
dencies and  builds  upon  them;  it  sees  that  the  essential  thing 
in  adolescent  growth  is  bringing  the  person  out  of  childhood 
into  the  new  life  of  maturity  and  personal  insight.  It  ac- 
cordingly brings  those  means  to  bear  which  will  intensify 
the  normal  tendencies.  It  shortens  up  the  period  of  duration 
of  storm  and  stress."  The  conversion  phenomena  of  "convic- 
tion of  sin"  last,  by  this  investigator's  statistics,  about  one 
fifth  as  long  as  the  periods  of  adolescent  storm  and  stress 
phenomena  of  which  he  also  got  statistics,  but  they  are  very 
much  more  intense.  Bodily  accompaniments,  loss  of  sleep 
and  appetite,  for  example,  are  much  more  frequent  in  them. 
"The  essential  distinction  appears  to  be  that  conversion  in- 
tensifies but  shortens  the  period  by  bringing  the  person  to  a 
definite  crisis."  ^ 

The  conversions  which  Dr.  Starbuck  here  has  in  mind  are 
of  course  mainly  those  of  very  commonplace  persons,  kept 
true  to  a  pre-appointed  type  by  instruction,  appeal,  and  ex- 
imple.  The  particular  form  which  they  affect  is  the  result  of 
suggestion    and    imitation."    If    they    went    through    thei/ 

^  E.  D.  Starbuck:  The  Psychology  of  Religion,  pp.  224,  262. 

^No  one  understands  this  better  than  Jonathan  Edwards  undei- 
itood  it  already.  Conversion  narradves  of  the  more  commonplace 
sort  must  always  be  taken  with  the  allowances  which  he  suggests: 


CONVERSION  197 

growth-crisis  in  other  faiths  and  other  countries,  although 
the  essence  of  the  change  would  be  the  same  (since  it  is  one 
in  the  main  so  inevitable),  its  accidents  would  be  different. 
In  Catholic  lands,  for  example,  and  in  our  own  Episcopalian 
sects,  no  such  anxiety  and  conviction  of  sin  is  usual  as  in 
sects  that  encourage  revivals.  The  sacraments  being  more  re- 
lied on  in  these  more  strictly  ecclesiastical  bodies,  the  indi- 
vidual's personal  acceptance  of  salvation  needs  less  to  be  ac- 
centuated and  led  up  to. 

But  every  imitative  phenomenon  must  once  have  had  its 
original,  and  I  propose  that  for  the  future  we  keep  as  close 
as  may  be  to  the  more  first-hand  and  original  forms  of  eX' 
perience.  These  are  more  likely  to  be  found  in  sporadic 
adult  cases. 

Professor  Leuba,  in  a  valuable  article  on  the  psychology  of 
conversion,^  subordinates  the  theological  aspect  of  the  reli- 
gious life  almost  entirely  to  its  moral  aspect.  The  religious 
sense  he  defines  as  "the  feeling  of  unwholeness,  of  moral  im^ 
perfection,  of  sin,  to  use  the  technical  word,  accompanied  by 

"A  rule  received  and  established  by  common  consent  has  a  very 
great,  though  to  many  persons  an  insensible  influence  in  forming 
their  notions  of  the  process  of  their  own  experience.  I  know  very 
well  how  they  proceed  as  to  this  matter,  for  I  have  had  frequent 
opportunities  of  observing  their  conduct.  Very  often  their  experience 
at  first  appears  like  a  confused  chaos,  but  then  those  parts  are  select- 
ed which  bear  the  nearest  resemblance  to  such  particular  steps  as 
are  insisted  on;  and  these  are  dwelt  upon  in  their  thoughts,  and 
spoken  of  from  time  to  time,  till  they  grow  more  and  more  conr 
spicuous  in  their  view,  and  other  parts  which  are  neglected  grow 
more  and  more  obscure.  Thus  what  they  have  experienced  is  in- 
sensibly strained,  so  as  to  bring  it  to  an  exact  conformity  to  the 
scheme  already  established  in  their  minds.  And  it  becomes  natural 
also  for  ministers,  who  have  to  deal  with  those  who  insist  upon  dis- 
tinctness and  clearness  of  method,  to  do  so  too."  Treatise  on  Re- 
ligious Affections. 

^  Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Religious  Phenomena,  American 
Journal  of  Psychology,  vii.  309  (1896). 


198       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

the  yearning  after  the  peace  of  unity."  "The  word  'reU- 
gion,' "  he  says,  "is  getting  more  and  more  to  signify  the 
conglomerate  of  desires  and  emotions  springing  from  the 
sense  of  sin  and  its  release";  and  he  gives  a  large  number  of 
examples,  in  which  the  sin  ranges  from  drunkenness  to  spir- 
itual pride,  to  show  that  the  sense  of  it  may  beset  one  and 
crave  relief  as  urgently  as  does  the  anguish  of  the  sickened 
flesh  or  any  form  of  physical  misery. 

Undoubtedly  this  conception  covers  an  immense  number 
of  cases.  A  good  one  to  use  as  an  example  is  that  of  Mr.  S. 
H.  Hadley,  who  after  his  conversion  became  an  active  and 
useful  rescuer  of  drunkards  in  New  York.  His  experience 
runs  as  follows: — 

"One  Tuesday  evening  I  sat  in  a  saloon  in  Harlem,  a  home- 
less, friendless,  dying  drunkard.  I  had  pawned  or  sold  every- 
thing that  would  bring  a  drink.  I  could  not  sleep  unless  I  was 
dead  drunk.  I  had  not  eaten  for  days,  and  for  four  nights  pre- 
ceding I  had  suffered  with  delirium  tremens,  or  the  horrors, 
from  midnight  till  morning.  I  had  often  said,  'I  will  never  be  a 
tramp.  I  will  never  be  cornered,  for  when  that  time  comes,  if 
ever  it  comes,  I  will  find  a  home  in  the  bottom  of  the  river.'  But 
the  Lord  so  ordered  it  that  when  that  time  did  come  I  was  not 
able  to  walk  one  quarter  of  the  way  to  the  river.  As  I  sat  there 
thinking,  I  seemed  to  feel  some  great  and  mighty  presence.  I 
did  not  know  then  what  it  was.  I  did  learn  afterwards  that  it 
was  Jesus,  the  sinner's  friend.  I  walked  up  to  the  bar  and 
pounded  it  with  my  fist  till  I  made  the  glasses  rattle.  Those  who 
Stood  by  drinking  looked  on  with  scornful  curiosity.  I  said  I 
would  never  take  another  drink,  if  I  died  on  the  street,  and 
.""eally  I  felt  as  though  that  would  happen  before  morning.  Some- 
thing said,  'If  you  want  to  keep  this  promise,  go  and  have  your- 
self locked  up.'  I  went  to  the  nearest  station-house  and  had  my- 
self locked  up. 

"I  was  placed  in  a  narrow  cell,  and  it  seemed  as  though  all 
the  demons  that  could  find  room  came  in  that  place  with  me. 
This  was  not  all  the  company  I  had,  either.  No,  praise  the  Lord; 


CONVERSION  199 

that  dear  Spirit  that  came  to  me  in  the  saloon  was  present,  and 
said,  Pray.  I  did  pray,  and  though  I  did  not  feel  any  great  help, 
I  kept  on  praying.  As  soon  as  I  was  able  to  leave  my  cell  I  was 
taken  to  the  police  court  and  remanded  back  to  the  cell.  I  was 
finally  released,  and  found  my  way  to  my  brother's  house,  where 
every  care  was  given  me.  While  lying  in  bed  the  admonishing 
Spirit  never  left  me,  and  when  I  arose  the  following  Sabbath 
morning  I  felt  that  day  would  decide  my  fate,  and  toward  even- 
ing it  came  into  my  head  to  go  to  Jerry  M'Auley's  Mission.  I 
went.  The  house  was  packed,  and  with  great  difficulty  I  made 
my  way  to  the  space  near  the  platform.  There  I  saw  the  apostU 
to   the   drunkard   and   the   outcast — that   man   of   God,    Jerr) 
M'Auley.  He  rose,  and  amid  deep  silence  told  his  experience, 
There  was  a  sincerity  about  this  man  that  carried  conviction 
with  it,  and  I  found  myself  saying,  'I  wonder  if  God  can  save 
me?'  I  listened  to  the  testimony  of  twenty-five  or  thirty  persons, 
every  one  of  whom  had  been  saved  from  rum,  and  I  made  up 
my  mind  that  I  v/ould  be  saved  or  die  right  there.  When  the 
invitation  was  given,  I  knelt  down  with  a  crowd  of  drunkards, 
Jerry  made  the  first  prayer.  Then  Mrs.  M'Auley  prayed  fervent- 
ly for  us.  Oh,  what  a  conflict  was  going  on  for  my  poor  soul!  A 
blessed  whisper  said,  'Come';  the  devil  said,  'Be  careful.'  I  halt- 
ed but  a  moment,  and  then,  with  a  breaking  heart,  I  said,  'Dear 
Jesus,  can  you  help  me?'  Never  with  mortal  tongue  can  I  de- 
scribe that  moment.  Although  up  to  that  moment  my  soul  had 
been  filled  with  indescribable  gloom,  I  felt  the  glorious  bright- 
ness of  the  noonday  sun  shine  into  my  heart.  I  felt  I  vvas  a  free 
man.  Oh,  the  precious  feeling  of  safety,  of  freedom,  of  resting 
on  Jesus!  I  felt  that  Christ  with  all  his  brightness  and  power 
had  come  into  my  life;  that,  indeed,  old  things  had  passed  away 
and  all  things  had  become  new. 

"From  that  moment  till  now  I  have  never  wanted  a  drink  of 
whiskey,  and  I  have  never  seen  money  enough  to  make  me  take 
one.  I  promised  God  that  night  that  if  he  would  take  away  the 
appetite  for  strong  drink,  I  would  work  for  him  all  my  life.  He 
has  done  his  part,  and  I  have  been  trying  to  do  mine."  ^ 

1 1  have  abridged  Mr.  Hadley's  account.  For  other  conversions  of 
drunkards,  sec  his  pamphlet,  Rescue  Mission  Work,  published  at  the 


200       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Dr.  Leuba  rightly  remarks  that  there  is  Uttle  doctrinal 
theology  in  such  an  experience,  which  starts  with  the  ab- 
solute need  of  a  higher  helper,  and  ends  with  the  sense  that 
he  has  helped  us.  He  gives  other  cases  of  drunkards'  con- 
versions which  are  purely  ethical,  containing,  as  recorded, 
no  theological  beliefs  whatever.  John  B.  Gough's  case,  for 
instance,  is  practically,  says  Dr.  Leuba,  the  conversion  of  an 
atheist — neither  God  nor  Jesus  being  mentioned.^  But  in 
spite  of  the  importance  of  this  type  of  regeneration,  with  lit- 
tle or  no  intellectual  readjustment,  this  writer  surely  makes 
it  too  exclusive.  It  corresponds  to  the  subjectively  centered 
form  of  morbid  melancholy,  of  which  Bunyan  and  AUine 
were  examples.  But  we  saw  in  our  seventh  lecture  that 
there  are  objective  forms  of  melancholy  also,  in  which  the 
lack  of  rational  meaning  of  the  universe,  and  of  life  any- 
how, is  the  burden  that  weighs  upon  one — you  remember 
Tolstoy's  case."  So  there  are  distinct  elements  in  conversion, 
and  their  relations  to  individual  lives  deserve  to  be  discrim- 
inated.^ 

Some  persons,  for  instance,  never  are,  and  possibly  never 
under  any  circumstances  could  be,  converted.  Religious  ideas 

Old  Jerry  M'Aulcy  Water  Street  Mission,  New  York  City.  A  striking 
collection  of  cases  also  appears  in  the  appendix  to  Professor  Leuba's 
article. 

^  A  restaurant  waiter  served  provisionally  as  Gough's  'Saviour.' 
General  Booth,  the  founder  of  the  Salvation  Army,  considers  that  the 
first  vital  step  in  saving  outcasts  consists  in  making  them  feel  that 
some  decent  human  being  cares  enough  for  them  to  take  an  interest 
in  the  question  whether  they  are  to  rise  or  sink. 

^  The  crisis  of  apadietic  melancholy — no  use  in  life — into  which  J. 
S.  Mill  records  that  he  fell,  from  which  he  emerged  by  the  reading  of 
Marniontel's  Memoirs  (Heaven  save  the  mark!)  and  Wordsworth's 
poetry,  is  another  intellectual  and  general  metaphysical  case.  See 
Mill's  Autobiography,  New  York,  1873,  pp.  141,  148. 

^  Starbuck,  in  addidon  to  "escape  from  sin,"  discriminates  "spiritual 
illumination"  as  a  distinct  type  of  conversion  experience.  Psychology 
of  Religion,  p.  85. 


CONVERSION  201 

cannot  become  the  centre  of  their  spiritual  energy.  They 
may  be  excellent  persons,  servants  of  God  in  practical  ways, 
but  they  are  not  children  of  his  kingdom.  They  are  either 
incapable  of  imagining  the  invisible;  or  else,  in  the  lan- 
guage of  devotion,  they  are  life-long  subjects  of  "barrenness" 
and  "dryness."  Such  inaptitude  for  religious  faith  may  in 
some  cases  be  intellectual  in  its  origin.  Their  religious  facul- 
ties may  be  checked  in  their  natural  tendency  to  expand,  b) 
beliefs  about  the  world  that  are  inhibitive,  the  pessimistic 
and  materialistic  beliefs,  for  example,  within  which  so  many 
good  souls,  who  in  former  times  would  have  freely  indulged 
their  religious  propensities,  find  themselves  nowadays,  as  it 
were,  frozen;  or  the  agnostic  vetoes  upon  faith  as  something 
weak  and  shameful,  under  which  so  many  of  us  today  lie 
cowering,  afraid  to  use  our  instincts.  In  many  persons  such 
inhibitions  are  never  overcome.  To  the  end  of  their  days 
they  refuse  to  believe,  their  personal  energy  never  gets  to  its 
religious  centre,  and  the  latter  remains  inactive  in  perpetu- 

In  other  persons  the  trouble  is  profounder.  There  are  men 
anaesthetic  on  the  religious  side,  deficient  in  that  category  of 
sensibility.  Just  as  a  bloodless  organism  can  never,  in  spite 
of  all  its  goodwill,  attain  to  the  reckless  "animal  spirits"  en- 
joyed by  those  of  sanguine  temperament;  so  the  nature 
which  is  spiritually  barren  may  admire  and  envy  faith  in 
others,  but  can  never  compass  the  enthusiasm  and  peace 
which  those  who  are  temperamentally  qualified  for  faith 
enjoy.  All  this  may,  however,  turn  out  eventually  to  have 
been  a  matter  of  temporary  inhibition.  Even  late  in  life 
some  thaw,  some  release  may  take  place,  some  bolt  be  shot 
back  in  the  barrenest  breast,  and  the  man's  hard  heart  may 
soften  and  break  into  religious  feeling.  Such  cases  more  than 
any  others  suggest  the  idea  that  sudden  conversion  is  by 
miracle.  So  long  as  they  exist,  we  must  not  imagine  our- 
selves to  deal  with  irretrievably  fixed  classes. 


202       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Now  there  are  two  forms  of  mental  occurrence  in  human 
lieings,  which  lead  to  a  striking  difference  in  the  conversion 
process,  a  difference  to  which  Professor  Starbuck  has  called 
?ttention.  You  know  how  it  is  when  you  try  to  recollect  a 
forgotten  name.  Usually  you  help  the  recall  by  working  for 
it,  by  mentally  running  over  the  places,  persons,  and  things 
with  which  the  word  was  connected.  But  sometimes  this 
effort  fails:  you  feel  then  as  if  the  harder  you  tried  the  less 
hope  there  would  be,  as  though  the  name  were  jammed,  and 
pressure  in  its  direction  only  kept  it  all  the  more  from  ris- 
ing. And  then  the  opposite  expedient  often  succeeds.  Give 
up  the  effort  entirely;  think  of  something  altogether  dif- 
ferent, and  in  half  an  hour  the  lost  name  comes  sauntering 
into  your  mind,  as  Emerson  says,  as  carelessly  as  if  it  had 
never  been  invited.  Some  hidden  process  was  started  in  you 
by  the  effort,  which  went  on  after  the  effort  ceased,  and 
made  the  result  come  as  if  it  came  spontaneously.  A  certain 
music  teacher,  says  Dr.  Starbuck,  says  to  her  pupils  after 
\he  thing  to  be  done  has  been  clearly  pointed  out,  and  un- 
successfully attempted:  ''Stop  trying  and  it  will  do  itself!"  ^ 

There  is  thus  a  conscious  and  voluntary  way  and  an  in- 
voluntary and  unconscious  way  in  which  mental  results  may 
get  accomplished;  and  we  find  both  ways  exemplified  in  the 
history  of  conversion,  giving  us  two  types,  which  Starbuck 
calls  the  volitional  type  and  the  type  by  self-surrender  re- 
spectively. 

In  the  volitional  type  the  regenerative  change  is  usually 
gradual,  and  consists  in  the  building  up,  piece  by  piece,  of 
1  new  set  of  moral  and  spiritual  habits.  But  there  are  always 
;ritical  points  here  at  which  the  movement  forward  seems 
much  more  rapid.  This  psychological  fact  is  abundantly  il- 
lustrated by  Dr.  Starbuck.  Our  education  in  any  practical 
accomplishment  proceeds  apparently  by  jerks  and  starts, 
ust  as  the  growth  of  our  physical  bodies  does. 

^Psychology  of  Religion,  p.  117. 


CONVERSION  203 

"An  athlete  .  .  .  sometimes  awakens  suddenly  to  an  under- 
standing of  the  fine  points  of  the  game  and  to  a  real  enjoyment 
of  it,  just  as  the  convert  awakens  to  an  appreciation  of  religion. 
If  he  keeps  on  engaging  in  the  sport,  there  may  come  a  day 
when  all  at  once  the  game  plays  itself  through  him — when  he 
loses  himself  in  some  great  contest.  In  the  same  way,  a  musician 
may  suddenly  reach  a  point  at  which  pleasure'  in  the  technique 
of  the  art  entirely  falls  away,  and  in  some  moment  of  inspira- 
tion he  becomes  the  instrument  through  which  music  flows. 
The  writer  has  chanced  to  hear  two  different  married  persona, 
both  of  whose  wedded  lives  had  been  beautiful  from  the  begin- 
ning,  relate  that  not  until  a  year  or  more  after  marriage  did  they 
awake  to  the  full  blessedness  of  married  life.  So  it  is  with  the 
religious  experience  of  these  persons  we  are  studying."  ^ 

We  shall  erelong  hear  still  more  remarkable  illustrations 
of  subconsciously  maturing  processes  eventuating  in  results 
o£  which  we  suddenly  grow  conscious.  Sir  William  Hamil- 
ton and  Professor  Laycock  of  Edinburgh  were  among  the 
first  to  call  attention  to  this  class  of  effects;  but  Dr.  Carpen- 
ter first,  unless  I  am  mistaken,  introduced  the  term  "un- 
conscious cerebration,"  which  has  since  then  been  a  popular 
phrase  of  explanation.  The  facts  are  now  known  to  us  far 
more  extensively  than  he  could  know  them,  and  the  adjec- 
tive "unconscious,"  being  for  many  of  them  almost  certainly 
a  misnomer,  is  better  replaced  by  the  vaguer  term  "subcon- 
scious" or  "subliminal." 

Of  the  volitional  type  of  conversion  it  would  be  easy  to 
give  examples,^  but  they  are  as  a  rule  less  interesting  than 

^Psychology  of  Religion,  p.  385.  Compare,  also,  pp.  137-144  and 
262. 

-  For  instance,  C.  G.  Finney  italicizes  the  volitional  element:  "Just 
at  this  point  the  whole  question  of  Gospel  salvation  opened  to  my 
mind  in  a  manner  most  marvelous  to  me  at  the  time.  I  think  I  ther 
saw,  as  clearly  as  I  ever  have  in  my  life,  the  reality  and  fullness  of  the 
atonement  of  Christ.  Gospel  salvation  seemed  to  me  to  be  an  offer 
of  something  to  be  accepted,  and  all  that  was  necessary  on  my  part  ta 


204      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

those  of  the  self-surrender  type,  in  which  the  subconscious 
effects  are  more  abundant  and  often  startUng.  I  will  there- 
fore hurry  to  the  latter,  the  more  so  because  the  difference 
between  the  two  types  is  after  all  not  radical.  Even  in  the 
most  voluntarily  built-up  sort  of  regeneration  there  are  pas- 
sages of  partial  self-surrender  interposed;  and  in  the  great 
majority  of  all  cases,  when  the  will  had  done  its  uttermost 
towards  bringing  one  close  to  the  complete  unification  as- 
pired after,  it  seems  that  the  very  last  step  must  be  left  to 
other  forces  and  performed  without  the  help  of  its  activity. 
In  other  words,  self-surrender  becomes  then  indispensable. 
"The  personal  will,"  says  Dr.  Starbuck,  "must  be  given  up. 

get  rr.y  own  consent  to  give  up  my  sins  and  accept  Christ.  After  this 
distinct  revelation  had  stood  for  some  litde  dme  before  my  mind, 
the  quesdon  seemed  to  be  put,  'Will  you  accept  it  now,  to-day?'  I  re- 
plied, 'Yes;  /  will  accept  it  to-day,  or  I  will  die  i?i  the  attcmptF  "  He 
then  went  into  the  woods,  where  he  describes  his  struggles.  He  could 
not  pray,  his  heart  was  hardened  in  its  pride.  "I  then  reproached  my- 
self for  having  promised  to  give  my  heart  to  God  before  I  left  the 
woods.  When  I  came  to  try,  I  found  I  could  not.  .  .  .  My  inward  soul 
hung  back^  and  there  was  no  going  out  of  my  heart  to  God.  The 
thought  was  pressing  me,  of  the  rashness  of  my  promise  that  I  would 
give  my  heart  to  God  that  day,  or  die  in  the  attempt.  It  seemed  to  me  as 
if  that  was  binding  on  my  soul;  and  yet  I  was  going  to  break  my  vow. 
A  great  sinking  and  discouragement  came  over  me,  and  I  felt  almost 
too  weak  to  stand  upon  my  knees.  Just  at  this  moment  I  again 
thought  I  heard  some  one  approach  me,  and  I  opened  my  eyes  to  see 
whether  it  were  so.  But  right  there  the  revelation  of  my  pride  of 
heart,  as  che  great  difficulty  that  stood  in  the  way,  was  disdncdy 
shown  to  me.  An  overwhelming  sense  of  my  wickedness  in  being 
ashamed  to  have  a  human  being  see  me  on  my  knees  before  God 
took  such  powerful  possession  of  me,  that  I  cried  at  the  top  of  my 
voice,  and  exclaimed  that  I  woidd  not  leave  that  place  if  all  the  men 
on  earth  and  all  the  devils  in  hell  surrounded  me.  'What!'  I  said,  'such 
a  degraded  sinner  as  I  am,  on  my  knees  confessing  my  sins  to  the 
great  and  holy  God;  and  ashamed  to  have  any  human  being,  and  a 
sinner  like  myself,  find  me  on  my  knees  endeavoring  to  make  my 
peace  with  my  offended  God!'  The  sin  appeared  awful,  infinite.  It 
broke  me  down  before  the  Lord."  Memoirs,  pp.  14-16,  abridged. 


CONVERSION  205 

In  many  cases  relief  persistently  refuses  to  come  until  the 
person  ceases  to  resist,  or  to  make  an  effort  in  the  direction 
he  desires  to  go." 

"I  had  said  I  would  not  give  up;  but  when  my  will  was  brok- 
en, it  was  all  over,"  writes  one  of  Starbuck's  correspondents.^ 
Another  says:  "I  simply  said:  'Lord,  I  have  done  all  I  can;  I 
leave  the  whole  matter  with  Thee;'  and  immediately  there 
came  to  me  a  great  peace." — Another:  "All  at  once  it  occurred 
to  me  that  I  might  be  saved,  too,  if  I  would  stop  trying  to  do  it 
all  myself,  and  follow  Jesus:  somehow  I  lost  my  load." — An- 
other: "I  finally  ceased  to  resist,  and  gave  myself  up,  though  it 
was  a  hard  struggle.  Gradually  the  feeling  came  over  me  that 
I  had  done  my  part,  and  God  was  willing  to  do  his."  ^ — "Lord, 
Thy  will  be  done;  damn  or  save!"  cries  John  Nelson,-  exhausted 
with  the  anxious  struggle  to  escape  damnation;  and  at  that 
moment  his  soul  was  filled  with  peace. 

Dr.  Starbuck  gives  an  interesting,  and  it  seems  to  me  a 
true,  account — so  far  as  conceptions  so  schematic  can  claim 
truth  at  all — of  the  reasons  why  self-surrender  at  the  last 
moment  should  be  so  indispensable.  To  begin  with,  there 
are  two  things  in  the  mind  of  the  candidate  for  conversion: 
first,  the  present  incompleteness  or  wrongness,  the  "sin" 
which  he  is  eager  to  escape  from;  and,  second,  the  positive 
ideal  which  he  longs  to  compass.  Now  with  most  of  us  the 
sense  of  our  present  wrongness  is  a  far  more  distinct  piece 
of  our  consciousness  than  is  the  imagination  of  any  positive 
ideal  we  can  aim  at.  In  a  majority  of  cases,  indeed,  the 
"sin"  almost  exclusively  engrosses  the  attention,  so  that  con' 
version  is  "a  process  of  struggling  away  from  sin  rathei 
than  of  striving  towards  righteousness."  ^  A  man's  conscious 
wit  and  will,  so  far  as  they  strain  towards  the  ideal,  are 

1  Starbuck:  Op.  cit.,  pp.  91,  114. 

2  Extracts, from  the  Journal  of  Mr.  John  Nelson,  London,  no  date, 
p.  24. 

^  Starbuck,  p.  64. 


206      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

aiming  at  something  only  dimly  and  inaccurately  imagined. 
Yet  all  the  while  the  forces  of  mere  organic  ripening  within 
him  are  going  on  towards  their  own  prefigured  result,  and 
his  conscious  strainings  are  letting  loose  subconscious  allies 
behind  the  scenes,  which  in  their  way  work  towards  re- 
arrangement; and  the  rearrangement  towards  which  all 
these  deeper  forces  tend  is  pretty  surely  definite,  and  defi- 
nitely different  from  what  he  consciously  conceives  and  de- 
termines. It  may  consequently  be  actually  interfered  with 
{jammed,  as  it  were,  like  the  lost  word  when  we  seek  too 
energetically  to  recall  it),  by  his  voluntary  efforts  slanting 
from  the  true  direction. 

Starbuck  seems  to  put  his  finger  on  the  root  of  the  matter 
when  he  says  that  to  exercise  the  personal  will  is  still  to  live 
in  the  region  where  the  imperfect  self  is  the  thing  most  em- 
phasized. Where,  on  the  contrary,  the  subconscious  forces 
take  the  lead,  it  is  more  probably  the  better  self  in  posse 
which  directs  the  operation.  Instead  of  being  clumsily  and 
vaguely  aimed  at  from  without,  it  is  then  itself  the  organ- 
izing centre.  What  then  must  the  person  do?  "He  must 
relax,"  says  Dr.  Starbuck— "that  is,  he  must  fall  back  on 
the  larger  Power  that  makes  for  righteousness,  which  has 
been  welling  up  in  his  own  being,  and  let  it  finish  in  its  own 
way  the  work  it  has  begun.  .  .  .  The  act  of  yielding,  in 
this  point  of  view,  is  giving  one's  self  over  to  the  new  life, 
making  it  the  centre  of  a  new  personality,  and  living,  from 
within,  the  truth  of  it  which  had  before  been  viewed  ob- 
jectively." ^ 

"Man's  extremity  is  God's  opportunity"  is  the  theologi- 
cal way  of  putting  this  fact  of  the  need  of  self-surrender; 
whilst  the  physiological  way  of  stating  it  would  be,  "Let 
one  do  all  in  one's  power,  and  one's  nervous  system  will  do 
^.he  rest."  Both  statements  acknowledge  the  same  fact.^ 

*  Starbuck,  p.  115. 
^Starpuck,  p.  113. 


CONVERSION  207 

To  state  it  in  terms  of  our  own  symbolism:  When  the 
new  centre  of  personal  energy  has  been  subconsciously  in- 
cubated so  long  as  to  be  just  ready  to  open  into  flower, 
"hands  off'  is  the  only  word  for  us,  it  must  burst  forth  un- 
aided! 

We  have  used  the  vague  and  abstract  language  of  psy- 
chology. But  since,  in  any  terms,  the  crisis  described  is  the 
throwing  of  our  conscious  selves  upon  the  mercy  of  powers 
which,  whatever  they  may  be,  are  more  ideal  than  we  are 
actually,  and  make  for  our  redemption,  you  see  why  self- 
surrender  has  been  and  always  must  be  regarded  as  the 
vital  turning-point  of  the  religious  life,  so  far  as  the  reli- 
gious life  is  spiritual  and  no  afifair  of  outer  works  and  ritual 
and  sacraments.  One  may  say  that  the  whole  development 
of  Christianity  in  inwardness  has  consisted  in  little  more 
than  the  greater  and  greater  emphasis  attached  to  this  crisis 
of  self-surrender.  From  Catholicism  to  Lutheranism,  and 
then  to  Calvinism;  from  that  to  Wesleyanism;  and  from 
this,  outside  of  technical  Christianity  altogether,  to  pure 
"liberalism"  or  transcendental  idealism,  whether  or  not  of  the 
mind-cure  type,  taking  in  the  mediaeval  mystics,  the  quiet' 
ists,  the  pietists,  and  quakers  by  the  way,  we  can  trace  the 
stages  of  progress  towards  the  idea  of  an  immediate  spiritual 
help,  experienced  by  the  individual  in  his  forlornness  and 
standing  in  no  essential  need  of  doctrinal  apparatus  or  pro- 
pitiatory  machinery. 

Psychology  and  religion  are  thus  in  perfect  harmony  up 
to  this  point,  since  both  admit  that  there  are  forces  seem- 
ingly outside  of  the  conscious  individual  that  bring  re- 
demption to  liis  life.  Nevertheless  psychology,  defining  these 
forces  as  "subconscious,"  and  speaking  of  their  effects,  as  due 
to  "incubation,"  or  "cerebration,"  implies  that  they  do  not 
transcend  the  individual's  personality;  and  herein  she  di- 
verges from  Christian  theology,  which  insists  that  they  are 
direct  supernatural  operations  of  the  Deity.  I  propose  to  you 


2o8       THE   VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

that  we  do  not  yet  consider  this  divergence  final,  but  leave 
the  question  for  a  while  in  abeyance — continued  inquiry 
may  enable  us  to  get  rid  of  some  of  the  apparent  discord. 

Revert,  then,  for  a  moment  more  to  the  psychology  of 
self-surrender. 

When  you  find  a  man  living  on  the  ragged  edge  of  his 
consciousness,  pent  in  to  his  sin  and  want  and  incomplete- 
ness, and  consequently  inconsolable,  and  then  simply  tell 
him  that  all  is  well  with  him,  that  he  must  stop  his  worry, 
break  with  his  discontent,  and  give  up  his  anxiety,  you  seem 
to  him  to  come  with  pure  absurdities.  The  only  positive 
consciousness  he  has  tells  him  that  all  is  not  well,  and  the 
better  way  you  offer  sounds  simply  as  if  you  proposed  to 
him  to  assert  cold-blooded  falsehoods.  "The  will  to  believe" 
cannot  be  stretched  as  far  as  that.  We  can  make  ourselves 
more  faithful  to  a  belief  of  which  we  have  the  rudiments, 
but  we  cannot  create  a  belief  out  of  whole  cloth  when  our 
perception  actively  assures  us  of  its  opposite.  The  better 
mind  proposed  to  us  comes  in  that  case  in  the  form  of  a  pure 
negation  of  the  only  mind  we  have,  and  we  cannot  actively 
will  a  pure  negation. 

There  are  only  two  ways  in  which  it  is  possible  to  get  rid 
of  anger,  worry,  fear,  despair,  or  other  undesirable  affec- 
tions. One  is  that  an  opposite  affection  should  overpower- 
ingly  break  over  us,  and  the  other  is  by  getting  so  exhausted 
with  the  struggle  that  we  have  to  stop — so  v/e  drop  down, 
give  up,  and  don't  care  any  longer.  Our  emotional  brain- 
centres  strike  work,  and  we  lapse  into  a  temporary  apathy. 
Now  there  is  documentary  proof  that  this  state  of  temporary 
exhaustion  not  infrequently  forms  part  of  the  conversion 
crisis.  So  long  as  the  egoistic  worry  of  the  sick  soul  guards 
the  door,  the  expansive  confidence  of  the  soul  of  faith  gains 
no  presence.  But  let  the  former  faint  away,  even  but  for  a 
moment,  and  the  latter  can  profit  by  the  opportunity,  and. 


CONVERSION  209 

having  once  acquired  possession,  may  retain  it.  Carlyle's 
Teufelsdrockh  passes  from  the  everlasting  No  to  the  ever- 
lasting Yes  through  a  "Centre  of  Indifference." 

Let  me  give  you  a  good  illustration  of  this  feature  in  the 
conversion  process.  That  genuine  saint,  David  Brainerd, 
describes  his  own  crisis  in  the  following  words: — 

"One  morning,  while  I  was  walking  in  a  solitary  place  as 
usual,  I  at  once  saw  that  all  my  contrivances  and  projects  to  ef- 
fect or  procure  deliverance  and  salvation  for  myself  were  utterly 
in  vain;  I  was  brought  quite  to  a  stand,  as  finding  myself  totally 
lost.  I  saw  that  it  was  forever  impossible  for  me  to  do  anything 
towards  helping  or  delivering  myself,  that  I  had  made  all  the 
pleas  I  ever  could  have  made  to  all  eternity;  and  that  all  my 
pleas  were  vain,  for  I  saw  that  self-interest  had  led  me  to  pray, 
and  that  I  had  never  once  prayed  from  any  respect  to  the  glory 
of  God.  I  saw  that  there  was  no  necessary  connection  between 
my  prayers  and  the  bestowment  of  divine  mercy;  that  they  laid 
not  the  least  obligation  upon  God  to  bestow  his  grace  upon  me; 
and  that  there  was  no  more  virtue  or  goodness  in  them  than 
there  would  be  in  my  paddling  with  my  hand  in  the  water.  1 
saw  that  I  had  been  heaping  up  my  devotions  before  God,  fast- 
ing, praying,  etc.,  pretending,  and  indeed  really  thinking  some- 
times that  I  was  aiming  at  the  glory  of  God;  whereas  I  never 
once  truly  intended  it,  but  only  my  own  happiness.  I  saw  that 
as  I  had  never  done  anything  for  God,  I  had  no  claim  on  any- 
thing from  him  but  perdition,  on  account  of  my  hypocrisy  and 
mockery.  When  I  saw  evidently  that. I  had  regard  to  nothing 
but  self-interest,  then  my  duties  appeared  a  vile  mockery  and  a 
continual  course  of  lies,  for  the  whole  was  nothing  but  self- 
worship,  and  an  horrid  abuse  of  God. 

"I  continued,  as  I  remember,  in  this  state  of  mind,  from 
Friday  morning  till  the  Sabbath  evening  following  (July  12, 
1739),  when  I  was  walking  again  in  the  same  solitary  place. 
Here,  in  a  mournful  melancholy  state  /  was  attempting  to  pray; 
but  found  no  heart  to  engage  in  that  or  any  other  duty;  my 
former  concern,  exercise,  and  religious  affections  were  now  gone. 
I  thought  that  the  Spirit  of  God  had  quite  left  me;  but  still  wa< 


210       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

not  distressed;  yet  disconsolate,  as  if  there  was  nothing  in  heaven 
or  earth  could  maJ^e  me  happy.  Having  been  thus  endeavoring 
to  pray — though,  as  I  thought,  very  stupid  and  senseless — for 
near  half  an  hour;  then,  as  I  was  walking  in  a  thick  grove,  un- 
speakable glory  seemed  to  open  to  the  apprehension  of  my  soul. 
I  do  not  mean  any  external  brightness,  nor  any  imagination  of 
a  body  of  light,  but  it  was  a  new  inward  apprehension  or  view 
that  I  had  of  God,  such  as  I  never  had  before,  nor  anything 
which  had  the  least  resemblance  to  it.  I  had  no  particular  ap- 
prehension of  any  one  person  in  the  Trinity,  either  the  Father, 
the  Son,  or  the  Holy  Ghost;  but  it  appeared  to  be  Divine  glory. 
My  soul  rejoiced  with  joy  unspeakable,  to  see  such  a  God,  such 
a  glorious  Divine  Being;  and  I  was  inwardly  pleased  and  sat- 
isfied that  he  should  be  God  over  all  for  ever  and  ever.  My  soul 
was  so  captivated  and  delighted  with  the  excellency  of  God  that 
[  was  even  swallowed  up  in  him;  at  least  to  that  degree  that  I 
had  no  thought  about  my  own  salvation,  and  scarce  reflected 
that  there  was  such  a  creature  as  myself.  I  continued  in  this 
state  of  inward  joy,  peace,  and  astonishing,  till  near  dark  with- 
out any  sensible  abatement;  and  then  began  to  think  and  ex- 
amine what  I  had  seen;  and  felt  sweetly  composed  in  my  mind 
all  the  evening  following.  I  felt  myself  in  a  new  world,  and 
everything  about  me  appeared  with  a  different  aspect  from  what 
it  was  wont  to  do.  At  this  time,  the  way  of  salvation  opened  to 
me  with  such  infinite  wisdom,  suitableness,  and  excellency,  that 
I  wondered  I  should  ever  think  of  any  ether  way  of  salvation; 
was  amazed  that  I  had  not  dropped  my  own  contrivances,  and 
complied  with  this  lovely,  blessed,  and  excellent  v.^ay  before.  If 
I  could  have  been  saved  by  my  own  duties  or  any  other  way  that 
I  had  formerly  contrived,  my  whole  soul  would  now  have  re- 
fused it.  I  wondered  that  all  the  v.'orld  did  not  see  and  comply 
with  this  way  of  salvation,  entirely  by  the  righteousness  of 
Christ."  1 

I  have  italicized  the  passage  which  records  the  exhaustion 
of  the  anxious  emotion  hitherto  habitual.  In  a  large  pro- 

1  Edward's  and  Dwight's  Life  of  Brainerd,  New  Haven,  1822,  pp. 
45-47,  abridged. 


CONVERSION  211 

portion,  perhaps  the  majority,  of  reports,  the  writers  speak 
as  if  the  exhaustion  of  the  lower  and  the  entrance  of  th& 
higher  emotion  were  simultaneous,^  yet  often  again  they 
speak  as  if  the  higher  actively  drove  the  lower  out.  This  is 
undoubtedly  true  in  a  great  many  instances,  as  we  shall 
presently  see.  But  often  there  seems  little  doubt  that  both 
conditions — subconscious  ripening  of  the  one  affection  and 
exhaustion  of  the  other — must  simultaneously  have  con- 
spired, in  order  to  produce  the  result. 

T.  W,  B.,  a  convert  of  Nettleton's,  being  brought  to  an  acute 
paroxysm  of  conviction  of  sin,  ate  nothing  all  day,  locked  him- 
self in  his  room  in  the  evening  in  complete  despair,  crying 
aloud,  "How  long,  O  Lord,  how  long?"  "After  repeating  this 
and  similar  language,"  he  says,  "several  times,  /  seemed  to  sin1{ 
away  into  a  state  of  insensibility.  When  I  came  to  myself  again 
I  was  on  my  knees,  praying  not  for  myself  but  for  others.  I  felt 
submission  to  the  will  of  God,  willing  that  he  should  do  with 
me  as  should  seem  good  in  his  sight.  My  concern  seemed  all 
lost  in  concern  for  others."  ^ 

Our  great  American  revivalist  Finney  writes:  "I  said  to  my- 
self: 'What  is  this?  I  must  have  grieved  the  Holy  Ghost  entirely 
away.  I  have  lost  all  my  conviction.  I  have  not  a  particle  of  con- 
cern about  my  soul;  and  it  must  be  that  the  Spirit  has  left  me. 
'Why!'  thought  I,  'I  never  was  so  far  from  being  concerned 
about  my  own  salvation  in  my  life.'  ...  I  tried  to  recall  my 
convictions,  to  get  back  again  the  load  of  sin  under  which  ) 

^  Describing  the  whole  phenomenon  as  a  change  of  equilibrium, 
we  might  say  that  the  movement  of  new  psychic  energies  towards  the 
personal  centre  and  the  recession  of  old  ones  towards  the  margin  (or 
the  rising  of  some  objects  above,  and  the  sinking  of  others  below  the 
conscious  threshold)  were  only  two  ways  of  describing  an  indivisible 
event.  Doubtless  this  is  often  absolutely  true,  and  Starbuck  is  right 
when  he  says  that  "self-surrender"  and  "new  determination," 
though  seeming  at  first  sight  to  be  such  different  experiences,  are 
"really  the  same  thing.  Self-surrender  sees  the  change  in  terms  of  the 
old  self;  determination  sees  it  in  terms  of  the  new."  Op.  cit.,  p.  i6o. 

-A.  A.  Bonar:  Nettlet(3n  and  his  Labors,  Edinburgh,  1854,  p.  261. 


•212      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

had  been  laboring.  I  tried  in  vain  to  make  myself  anxious.  I  was 
so  quiet  and  peaceful  that  I  tried  to  feel  concerned  about  that, 

lest  it  should  be  the  result  of  my  having  grieved  the  Spirit 

"  1 
away. 

But  beyond  all  question  there  are  persons  in  whom,  quite 
independently  of  any  exhaustion  in  the  Subject's  capacity 
for  feeling,  or  even  in  the  absence  of  any  acute  previous  feel- 
ing, the  higher  condition,  having  reached  the  due  degree  of 
energy,  bursts  through  all  barriers  and  sweeps  in  like  a  sud- 
den flood.  These  are  the  most  striking  and  memorable 
cases,  the  cases  of  instantaneous  conversion  to  which  the 
conception  of  divine  grace  has  been  most  peculiarly  at- 
tached. I  have  given  one  of  them  at  length — the  case  of  Mr. 
Bradley,  But  I  had  better  reserve  the  other  cases  and  my 
comments  on  the  rest  of  the  subject  for  the  following  lecture. 

^  Charles  G.  Finney:  Memoirs  written  by  Himself,  1876,  pp.  17, 


Lecture  X 
CONVERSION— C(7«r/«^/(fi 

IN  this  lecture  we  have  to  finish  the  subject  of  Conver- 
sion, considering  at  first  those  striking  instantaneous  in- 
stances o£  vi'hich  Saint  Paul's  is  the  most  eminent,  and  in 
v^^hich,  often  amid  tremendous  emotional  excitement  or  per- 
turbation of  the  senses,  a  complete  division  is  established  in 
the  twinkling  of  an  eye  between  the  old  life  and  the  new. 
Conversion  of  this  type  is  an  important  phase  of  religious 
experience,  owing  to  the  part  which  it  has  played  in  Protes- 
tant theology,  and  it  behooves  us  to  study  it  conscientiously 
on  that  account. 

I  think  I  had  better  cite  two  or  three  of  these  cases  before 
proceeding  to  a  more  generalized  account.  One  must  know 
concrete  instances  first;  for,  as  Professor  Agassiz  used  to 
say,  one  can  see  no  farther  into  a  generalization  than  just 
so  far  as  one's  previous  acquaintance  with  particulars  en- 
ables one  to  take  it  in.  I  will  go  back,  then,  to  the  case  of 
our  friend  Henry  Alline,  and  quote  his  report  of  the  26th 
of  March,  1775,  on  which  his  poor  divided  mind  became 
unified  for  good. 

"As  I  was  about  sunset  wandering  in  the  fields  lamenting  my 
miserable  lost  and  undone  condition,  and  almost  ready  to  sinl 
under  my  burden,  I  thought  I  was  in  such  a  miserable  case  as 
never  any  man  was  before.  I  returned  to  the  house,  and  when  I 
got  to  the  door,  just  as  I  was  stepping  off  the  threshold,  the  fol- 
lowing impressions  came  into  my  mind  like  a  powerful  but 
small  still  voice.  You  have  been  seeking,  praying,  reforming, 

213 


214      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

laboring,  reading,  hearing,  and  meditating,  and  what  have  you 
done  by  it  towards  your  salvation?  Are  you  any  nearer  to  con- 
version now  than  when  you  first  began  ?  Are  you  any  more  pre- 
pared for  heaven,  or  fitter  to  appear  before  the  impartial  bar  of 
God,  than  when  you  first  began  to  seek? 

"It  brought  such  conviction  on  me  that  I  was  obliged  to  say 
that  I  did  not  think  I  was  one  step  nearer  than  at  first,  but  as 
much  condemned,  as  much  exposed,  and  as  miserable  as  before. 
I  cried  out  within  myself,  O  Lord  God,  I  am  lost,  and  if  thou, 
O  Lord,  dost  not  find  out  some  new  way,  I  know  nothing  of,  I 
shall  never  be  saved,  for  the  ways  and  methods  I  have  prescribed 
to  myself  have  all  failed  me,  and  I  am  willing  they  should  fail. 

0  Lord,  have  mercy!  O  Lord,  have  mercy! 

"These  discoveries  continued  until  I  went  into  the  house  and 
sat  down.  After  I  sat  down,  being  all  in  confusion,  like  a  drown- 
ing man  that  was  just  giving  up  to  sink,  and  almost  in  an  agony, 

1  turned  very  suddenly  round  in  my  ch'air,  and  seeing  part  of  an 
old  Bible  lying  in  one  of  the  chairs,  I  caught  hold  of  it  in  great 
haste;  and  opening  it  without  any  premeditation,  cast  my  eyes 
on  the  38th  Psalm,  which  was  the  first  time  I  ever  saw  the  word 
of  God:  it  took  hold  of  me  with  such  power  that  it  seemed  to  go 
through  my  whole  soul,  so  that  it  seemed  as  if  God  was  praying 
in,  with,  and  for  me.  About  this  time  my  father  called  the  family 
to  attend  prayers;  I  attended,  but  paid  no  regard  to  what  he  said 
in  his  prayer,  but  continued  praying  in  those  words  of  the  Psalm. 
Oh,  help  me,  help  me!  cried  I,  thou  Redeemer  of  souls,  and 
save  me,  or  I  am  gone  forever;  thou  canst  this  night,  if  thou 
pleasest,  with  one  drop  of  thy  blood  atone  for  my  sins,  and  ap- 
pease the  wrath  of  an  angry  God.  At  that  instant  of  time  when 
I  gave  all  up  to  liim  to  do  with  me  as  he  pleased,  and  was  willing 
that  God  should  rule  over  me  at  his  pleasure,  redeeming  love 
broke  into  my  soul  with  repeated  scriptures,  with  such  power 
that  my  whole  soul  seemed  to  be  melted  down  with  love;  the 
burden  of  guilt  and  condemnation  was  gone,  darkness  was  ex- 
pelled, my  heart  humbled  and  filled  with  gratitude,  and  my 
whole  soul,  that  was  a  few  minutes  ago  groaning  under  moun- 
tains of  death,  and  crying  to  an  unknown  God  for  help,  was 
now  filled  with  immortal  love,  soaring  on  the  wings  of  faith, 


CONVERSION  215 

freed  from  the  chains  of  death  and  darkness,  and  crying  out, 
My  Lord  and  my  God;  thou  art  my  rock  and  my  fortress,  my 
shield  and  my  high  tower,  my  Hfe,  my  joy,  my  present  and  my 
everlasting  portion.  Looking  up,  I  thought  I  saw  that  same  light 
[he  had  on  more  than  one  previous  occasion  seen  subjectively 
a  bright  blaze  of  light],  though  it  appeared  different;  and  as 
soon  as  I  saw  it,  the  design  was  opened  to  me,  according  to  his 
promise,  and  I  was  obliged  to  cry  out:  Enough,  enough,  O 
blessed  God!  The  work  of  conversion,  the  change,  and  the 
manifestations  of  it  are  no  more  disputable  than  that  light  which 
I  see,  or  anything  that  ever  I  saw. 

"In  the  midst  of  all  my  joys,  in  less  than  half  an  hour  after  my 
soul  was  set  at  liberty,  the  Lord  discovered  to  me  my  labor  in 
the  ministry  and  call  to  preach  the  gospel.  I  cried  out,  Amen, 
Lord,  I'll  go;  send  me,  send  me.  I  spent  the  greatest  part  of  the 
night  in  ecstasies  of  joy,  praising  and  adoring  the  Ancient  of 
Days  for  his  free  and  unbounded  grace.  After  I  had  been  so 
long  in  this  transport  and  heavenly  frame  that  my  nature 
seemed  to  require  sleep,  I  thought  to  close  my  eyes  for  a  few 
moments;  then  the  devil  stepped  in,  and  told  me  that  if  I  went 
to  sleep,  I  should  lose  it  all,  and  when  I  should  awake  in  the 
morning  I  would  find  it  to  be  nothing  but  a  fancy  and  delusion. 
I  immediately  cried  out,  O  Lord  God,  if  I  am  deceived,  un- 
deceive  me. 

"I  then  closed  my  eyes  for  a  few  minutes,  and  seemed  to  be 
refreshed  with  sleep;  and  when  I  awoke,  the  first  inquiry  was, 
Where  is  my  God?  And  in  an  instant  of  time,  my  soul  seemed 
awake  in  and  with  God,  and  surrounded  by  the  arms  of  ever- 
lasting love.  About  sunrise  I  arose  with  joy  to  relate  to  my 
parents  what  God  had  done  for  my  soul,  and  declared  to  them 
the  miracle  of  God's  unbounded  grace.  I  took  a  Bible  to  show 
them  the  words  that  were  impressed  by  God  on  m.y  soul  the 
evening  before;  but  when  I  came  to  open  the  Bible,  it  appeared 
all  new  to  me. 

"I  so  longed  to  be  useful  in  the  cause  of  Christ,  in  preaching 
the  gospel,  that  it  seemed  as  if  I  could  not  rest  any  longer,  but 
go  I  must  and  tell  the  wonders  of  redeeming  love.  I  lost  all 


2l6       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

taste  for  carnal  pleasures,  and  carnal  company,  and  was  enabled 
to  forsake  them."  ^ 

Young  Mr.  AUine,  after  the  briefest  of  delays,  and  with  no 
book-learning  but  his  Bible,  and  no  teaching  save  that  of 
his  own  experience,  became  a  Christian  minister,  and  thence- 
forward his  life  was  fit  to  rank,  for  its  austerity  and  single- 
mindedness,  with  that  of  the  most  devoted  saints.  But  hap- 
py as  he  became  in  his  strenuous  way,  he  never  got  his 
taste  for  even  the  most  innocent  carnal  pleasures  back.  We 
must  class  him,  like  Bunyan  and  Tolstoy,  amongst  those 
upon  whose  soul  the  iron  of  melancholy  left  a  permanent 
imprint.  His  redemption  was  into  another  universe  than 
this  mere  natural  world,  and  life  remained  for  him  a  sad 
and  patient  trial.  Years  later  we  can  find  him  making  such 
an  entry  as  this  in  his  diary:  "On  Wednesday  the  12th  I 
preached  at  a  wedding,  and  had  the  happiness  thereby  to  be 
the  means  of  excluding  carnal  mirth." 

The  next  case  I  will  give  is  that  of  a  correspondent  of 
Professor  Leuba,  printed  in  the  latter's  article,  already  cited, 
in  vol.  vi.  of  the  American  Journal  of  Psychology.  This  sub- 
ject was  an  Oxford  graduate,  the  son  of  a  clergyman,  and 
the  story  resembles  in  many  points  the  classic  case  of  Col- 
onel Gardiner,  which  everybody  may  be  supposed  to  know. 
Here  it  is,  somewhat  abridged: — 

"Between  the  period  of  leaving  Oxford  and  my  conversion  1 
iiever  darkened  the  door  of  my  father's  church,  although  I  lived 
with  him  for  eight  years,  making  what  money  I  wanted  by 
journalism,  and  spending  it  in  high  carousal  with  any  one  who 
would  sit  with  me  and  drink  it  away.  So  I  lived,  sometimes 
drunk  for  a  week  together,  and  then  a  terrible  repentance,  and 
would  not  touch  a  drop  for  a  whole  month. 

"In  all  this  period,  that  is,  up  to  thirty-three  years  of  age,  I 
never  had  a  desire  to  reform  on  religious  grounds.  But  all  my 

^  Life  and  Journals,  Boston,  1806,  pp.  31-40,  abridged. 


CONVERSION  217 

pangs  were  due  to  some  terrible  remorse  I  used  to  feel  after  a 
heavy  carousal,  the  remorse  taking  the  shape  of  regret  after  my 
folly  in  wasting  my  life  in  such  a  way — a  man  of  superior  talent* 
and  education.  This  terrible  remorse  turned  me  gray  in  one 
night,  and  whenever  it  came  upon  me  I  was  perceptibly  grayef 
the  next  morning.  What  I  suffered  in  this  way  is  beyond  the 
expression  of  words.  It  was  hell-fire  in  all  its  most  dreadful  tor- 
tures. Often  did  I  vow  that  if  I  got  over  'this  time'  I  would  re- 
form. Alas,  in  about  three  days  I  fully  recovered,  and  was  as 
happy  as  ever.  So  it  went  on  for  years,  but,  with  a  physique  like 
a  rhinoceros,  I  always  recovered,  and  as  long  as  I  let  drink  alone, 
no  man  was  as  capable  of  enjoying  life  as  I  was. 

"I  was  converted  in  my  own  bedroom  in  my  father's  rectory 
house  at  precisely  three  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  of  a  hot  July 
day  (July  13,  1886).  I  was  in  perfect  health,  having  been  off 
from  the  drink  for  nearly  a  month.  I  was  in  no  way  troubled 
about  my  soul.  In  fact,  God  was  not  in  my  thoughts  that  day. 
A  young  lady  friend  sent  me  a  copy  of  Professor  Drummond's 
Natural  Law  in  the  Spiritual  World,  asking  me  my  opinion  of 
it  as  a  literary  work  only.  Being  proud  of  my  critical  talents  and 
wishing  to  enhance  myself  in  my  new  friend's  esteem,  I  took 
the  book  to  my  bedroom  for  quiet,  intending  to  give  it  a  thor 
ough  study,  and  then  write  her  what  I  thought  of  it.  It  was  here 
that  God  met  me  face  to  face,  and  I  shall  never  forget  the  meet 
ing.  'He  that  hath  the  Son  hath  life  eternal,  he  that  hath  not  the 
Son  hath  not  life.'  I  had  read  this  scores  of  times  before,  but  this 
made  all  the  difference.  I  was  now  in  God's  presence  and  my  at- 
tention was  absolutely  'soldered'  on  to  this  verse,  and  I  was  not 
allowed  to  proceed  with  the  book  till  I  had  fairly  considered 
what  these  words  really  involved.  Only  then  was  I  allowed  tx> 
proceed,  feeling  all  the  while  that  there  was  another  being  in 
my  bedroom,  though  not  seen  by  me.  The  stillness  was  very 
marvelous,  and  I  felt  supremely  happy.  It  was  most  unquestion- 
ably shown  me,  in  one  second  of  time,  that  I  had  never  touched 
the  Eternal:  and  that  if  I  died  then,  I  must  inevitably  be  lost.  I 
was  undone.  I  knew  it  as  well  as  I  now  know  I  am  saved.  The 
Spirit  of  God  showed  it  me  in  ineffable  love;  there  was  no  terror 
in  it;  I  felt  God's  love  so  powerfully  upon  me  that  only  a  mighty 


2l8       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

sorrow  crept  over  me  that  I  had  lost  all  through  my  own  folly; 
and  what  was  I  to  do?  What  could  I  do?  I  did  not  repent  even; 
God  never  asked  me  to  repent.  All  I  felt  was  'I  am  undone,'  and 
God  cannot  help  it,  although  he  loves  me.  No  fault  on  the  part 
of  the  Almighty.  All  the  time  I  was  supremely  happy:  I  felt  like 
a  little  child  before  his  father.  I  had  done  wrong,  but  my  Father 
did  not  scold  me,  but  loved  me  most  wondrously.  Still  my  doom 
was  sealed.  I  was  lost  to  a  certainty,  and  being  naturally  of  a 
brave  disposition  I  did  not  quail  under  it,  but  deep  sorrow  for 
the  past,  mixed  with  regret  for  what  I  had  lost,  took  hold  upon 
me,  and  my  soul  thrilled  within  me  to  think  it  was  all  over. 
Then  there  crept  in  upon  me  so  gently,  so  lovingly,  so  unmis- 
takably, a  way  of  escape,  and  what  was  it  after  all?  The  old,  old 
story  over  again,  told  in  the  simplest  way:  'There  is  no  name 
under  heaven  whereby  ye  can  be  saved  except  that  of  the  Lord 
Jesus  Christ.'  No  words  were  spoken  to  me;  my  soul  seemed  to 
see  my  Saviour  in  the  spirit,  and  from  that  hour  to  this,  nearly 
nine  years  now,  there  has  never  been  in  my  life  one  doubt  that 
the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  God  the  Father  both  worked  upon 
me  that  afternoon  in  July,  both  differently,  and  both  in  the  most 
perfect  love  conceivable,  and  I  rejoiced  there  and  then  in  a  con- 
version so  astounding  that  the  whole  village  heard  of  it  in  less 
than  twenty-four  hours. 

"But  a  time  of  trouble  was  yet  to  come.  The  day  after  my 
conversion  I  went  into  the  hay-field  to  lend  a  hand  with  the 
harvest,  and  not  having  made  any  promise  to  God  to  abstain  or 
drink  in  moderation  only,  I  took  too  much  and  came  home 
drunk.  My  poor  sister  was  heart-broken;  and  I  felt  ashamed  of 
myself  and  got  to  my  bedroom  at  once,  where  she  followed  me, 
weeping  copiously.  She  said  I  had  been  converted  and  fallen 
away  instantly.  But  although  I  was  quite  full  of  drink  (not 
muddled,  hov/ever),  I  knew  that  God's  work  begun  in  me  was 
not  going  to  be  wasted.  About  midday  I  made  on  my  knees  the 
first  prayer  before  God  for  twenty  years.  I  did  not  ask  to  be  for- 
given; I  felt  that  was  no  good,  for  I  would  be  sure  to  fall  again. 
Well,  what  did  I  do?  I  committed  myself  to  him  in  the  pro- 
.'^oundest  belief  that  my  individuality  was  going  to  be  destroyed, 
ihat  he  would  take  all  from  me,  and  I  was  willing.  In  such  a 


CONVERSION  2ig 

surrender  lies  the  secret  of  a  holy  life.  From  that  hour  drink  has 
had  no  terrors  for  me:- 1  never  touch  it,  never  want  it.  The  same 
thing  occurred  with  my  pipe:  after  being  a  regular  smoker  from 
my  twelfth  year  the  desire  for  it  went  at  once,  and  has  never  re- 
turned. So  with  every  known  sin,  the  deliverance  in  each  case 
being  permanent  and  complete.  I  have  had  no  temptation  since 
conversion,  God  seemingly  having  shut  out  Satan  from  that 
course  with  me.  He  gets  a  free  hand  in  other  ways,  but  never  on 
sins  of  the  flesh.  Since  I  gave  up  to  God  all  ownership  in  my 
own  life,  he  has  guided  me  in  a  thousand  ways,  and  has  opened 
my  path  in  a  way  almost  incredible  to  those  who  do  not  enjoy 
the  blessing  of  a  truly  surrendered  life." 

So  much  for  our  graduate  of  Oxford,  in  whom  you  notice 
the  complete  abolition  of  an  ancient  appetite  as  one  of  the 
conversion's  fruits. 

The  most  curious  record  of  sudden  conversion  with  which 
I  am  acquainted  is  that  of  M.  Alphonse  Ratisbonne,  a  free- 
thinking  French  Jew,  to  Catholicism,  at  Rome  in  1842.  In 
a  letter  to  a  clerical  friend,  written  a  few  months  later,  the 
convert  gives  a  palpitating  account  of  the  circumstances.-' 
The  predisposing  conditions  appear  to  have  been  slight.  He 
had  an  elder  brother  who  had  been  converted  and  was  a 
Catholic  priest.  He  was  himself  irreligious,  and  nourished 
an  antipathy  to  the  apostate  brother  and  generally  to  his 
"cloth."  Finding  himself  at  Rome  in  his  twenty-ninth  year, 
he  fell  in  with  a  French  gentleman  who  tried  to  make  a 
proselyte  of  him,  but  who  succeeded  no  farther  after  two  or 
three  conversations  than  to  get  him  to  hang  (half  jocosely)  a 
religious  medal  round  his  neck,  and  to  accept  and  read  a 
copy  of  a  short  prayer  to  the  Virgin.  M.  Ratisbonne  repre^ 
sents  his  own  part  in  the  conversations  as  having  been  of  a 

1  My  quotations  are  made  from  an  Italian  translation  of  this  letter 
in  the  Biografia  del  Sig.  M.  A.  Ratisbonne,  Ferrara,  1843,  which  i 
have  to  thank  Monsignore  D.  O'Connell  of  Rome  for  bringing  to  m-' 
notice.  I  abridge  the  original. 


220      THE   VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

light  and  chaffing  order;  but  he  notes  the  fact  thatior  some 
days  he  was  unable  to  banish  the  words  of  the  prayer  from 
his  mind,  and  that  the  night  before  the  crisis  he  had  a  sort 
of  nightmare,  in  the  imagery  of  which  a  black  cross  with  no 
Christ  upon  it  figured.  Nevertheless,  until  noon  of  the  next 
day  he  was  free  in  mind  and  spent  the  time  in  trivial  con- 
versations. I  now  give  his  own  words. 

"If  at  this  time  any  one  had  accosted  me,  saying:  'Alphonse, 
in  a  quarter  of  an  hour  you  shall  be  adoring  Jesus  Christ  as  your 
God  and  Saviour;  you  shall  lie  prostrate  with  your  face  upon 
the  ground  in  a  humble  church;  you  shall  be  smiting  your  breast 
at  the  foot  of  a  priest;  you  shall  pass  the  carnival  in  a  college  of 
Jesuits  to  prepare  yourself  to  receive  baptism,  ready  to  give  your 
life  for  the  Catholic  faith;  you  shall  renounce  the  world  and  its 
pomps  and  pleasures;  renounce  your  fortune,  your  hopes,  and  if 
need  be,  your  betrothed;  the  affections  of  your  family,  the  es- 
teem of  your  friends,  and  your  attachment  to  the  Jewish  people; 
you  shall  have  no  other  aspiration  than  to  follow  Christ  and 
bear  his  cross  till  death;' — if,  I  say,  a  prophet  had  come  to  me 
with  such  a  prediction,  I  should  have  judged  that  only  one  per- 
son could  be  more  mad  than  he — whosoever,  namely,  might  be- 
lieve in  the  possibility  of  such  senseless  folly  becoming  true.  And 
yet  that  folly  is  at  present  my  only  wisdom,  my  sole  happiness. 

"Coming  out  of  the  cafe  I  met  the  carriage  of  Monsieur  B. 
[the  proselyting  friend].  He  stopped  and  invited  me  in  for  a 
drive,  but  first  asked  me  to  wait  for  a  few  minutes  whilst  he  at- 
tended to  some  duty  at  the  church  of  San  Andrea  delle  Fratte. 
Instead  of  waiting  in  the  carriage,  I  entered  the  church  myself 
to  look  at  it.  The  church  of  San  Andrea  was  poor,  small,  and 
empty;  I  believe  that  I  found  myself  there  almost  alone.  No 
work  of  art  attracted  my  attention;  and  I  passed  my  eyes  me- 
chanically over  its  interior  without  being  arrested  by  any  partic- 
ular thought.  I  can  only  remember  an  entirely  black  dog  which 
went  trotting  and  turning  before  me  as  I  mused.  In  an  instant 
the  dog  had  disappeared,  the  whole  church  had  vanished,  I  no 
longer  saw  anything,  ...  or  more  truly  I  saw,  O  my  God,  one 
thing  alone. 


CONVERSION  221 

"Heavens,  how  can  I  speak  of  it?  Oh  no!  human  words  can 
not  attain  to  expressing  the  inexpressible.  Any  description,  how- 
ever subUme  it  might  be,  could  be  but  a  profanation  of  the  un- 
speakable truth. 

"I  was  there  prostrate  on  the  ground,  bathed  in  my  tears,  with 
my  heart  beside  itself,  when  M.  B.  called  me  back  to  life.  I  could 
not  reply  to  the  questions  which  followed  from  him  one  upon 
the  other.  But  finally  I  took  the  medal  which  I  had  on  my 
breast,  and  with  all  the  effusion  of  my  soul  I  kissed  the  image 
of  the  Virgin,  radiant  with  grace,  which  it  bore.  Oh,  indeed,  it 
was  She!  It  was  indeed  She!  [What  he  had  seen  had  been  a 
vision  of  the  Virgin.] 

"I  did  not  know  where  I  was:  I  did  not  know  whether  I  was 
Alphonsc  or  another.  I  only  felt  myself  changed  and  believed 
myself  another  me;  I  looked  for  myself  in  myself  and  did  not 
find  myself.  In  the  bottom  of  my  soul  I  felt  an  explosion  of  the 
most  ardent  joy;  I  could  not  speak;  I  had  no  wish  to  reveal  what 
had  happened.  But  I  felt  something  solemn  and  sacred  within 
me  which  made  me  ask  for  a  priest.  I  was  led  to  one;  and  there, 
alone,  after  he  had  given  me  the  positive  order,  I  spoke  as  best  1 
could,  kneeling,  and  with  my  heart  still  trembling.  I  could  give 
no  account  to  myself  of  the  truth  of  which  I  had  acquired  a 
knowledge  and  a  faith.  All  that  I  can  say  is  that  in  an  instant 
the  bandage  had  fallen  from  my  eyes;  and  not  one  bandage 
only,  but  the  whole  manifold  of  bandages  in  which  I  had 'been 
brought  up.  One  after  another  they  rapidly  disappeared,  even 
as  the  mud  and  ice  disappear  under  the  rays  of  the  burning  sun. 

"I  came  out  as  from  a  sepulchre,  from  an  abyss  of  darkness; 
and  I  was  living,  perfectly  living.  But  I  wept,  for  at  the  bottom 
of  that  gulf  I  saw  the  extreme  of  misery  from  which  I  had  been 
saved  by  an  infinite  mercy;  and  I  shuddered  at  the  sight  of  my 
iniquities,  stupefied,  melted,  overwhelmed  with  wonder  and 
with  gratitude.  You  may  ask  me  how  I  came  to  this  new  insight^ 
for  truly  I  had  never  opened  a  book  of  religion  nor  even  read  a 
single  page  of  the  Bible,  and  the  dogma  of  original  sin  is  cither 
entirely  denied  or  forgotten  by  the  Hebrews  of  to-day,  so  that  I 
had  thought  so  little  about  it  that  I  doubt  whether  I  ever  kncjw 
its  name.  But  how  came  I,  then,  to  this  perception  of  it?  I  can 


222      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

answer  nothing  save  this,  that  on  entering  that  church  I  was  in 
darkness  altogether,  and  on  coming  out  of  it  I  saw  the  fullness 
of  the  light.  I  can  explain  the  change  no  better  than  by  the  simile 
of  a  profound  sleep  or  the  analogy  of  one  born  blind  who  should 
suddenly  open  his  eyes  to  the  day.  He  sees,  but  cannot  define  the 
light  which  bathes  him  and  by  means  of  which  he  sees  the  ob- 
jects which  excite  his  wonder.  If  we  cannot  explain  physical 
light,  how  can  we  explain  the  light  which  is  the  truth  itself? 
And  I  think  I  remain  within  the  limits  of  veracity  when  I  say 
that  without  having  any  knowledge  of  the  letter  of  religious 
doctrine,  I  now  intuitively  perceived  its  sense  and  spirit.  Better 
than  if  I  saw  them,  I  feh  those  hidden  things;  I  felt  them  by  the 
inexplicable  effects  they  produced  in  me.  It  all  happened  in  my 
interior  mind;  and  those  impressions,  more  rapid  than  thought, 
shook  my  soul,  revolved  and  turned  it,  as  it  were,  in  another  di- 
rection, towards  other  aims,  by  other  paths.  I  express  myself 
badly.  But  do  you  wish,  Lord,  that  I  should  inclose  in  poor  and 
barren  words  sentiments  which  the  heart  alone  can  under- 
stand.?" 

I  might  multiply  cases  almost  indefinitely,  but  these  will 
suffice  to  show  you  how  real,  definite,  and  memorable  an 
event  a  sudden  conversion  may  be  to  him  who  has  the  ex- 
perience. Throughout  the  height  of  it  he  undoubtedly  seems 
to  himself  a  passive  spectator  or  undergoer  of  an  astounding 
process  performed  upon  him  from  above.  There  is  too  much 
evidence  of  this  for  any  doubt  of  it  to  be  possible.  Theology, 
combining  this  fact  with  the  doctrines  of  election  and  grace, 
has  concluded  that  the  spirit  of  God  is  with  us  at  these  dra- 
matic moments  in  a  peculiarly  miraculous  way,  unlike  what 
happens  at  any  other  juncture  of  our  lives.  At  that  moment, 
it  believes,  an  absolutely  new  nature  is  breathed  into  us,  and 
we  become  partakers  of  the  very  substance  of  the  Deity. 

That  the  conversion  should  be  instantaneous  seems  called 
for  on  this  view,  and  the  Moravian  Protestants  appear  to 
have  been  the  first  to  see  this  logical  consequence.  The 
Methodists  soon  followed  suit,  practically  if  not  dogmati- 


CONVERSION  223 

cally,  and  a  short  time  ere  his  death,  John  Wesley  wrote: — 

"In  London  alone  I  found  652  members  of  our  Society  who 
were  exceeding  clear  in  their  experience,  and  whose  testimony  I 
could  see  no  reason  to  doubt.  And  every  one  of  these  (without 
a  single  exception)  has  declared  that  his  deliverance  from  sin 
was  instantaneous;  that  the  change  was  wrought  in  a  moment. 
Had  half  of  these,  or  one  third,  or  one  in  twenty,  declared  it  was 
gradually  wrought  in  them,  I  should  have  believed  this,  with 
regard  to  them,  and  thought  that  some  were  gradually  sanctified 
and  some  instantaneously.  But  as  I  have  not  found,  in  so  long  a 
space  of  time,  a  single  person  speaking  thus,  I  cannot  but  believe 
that  sanctification  is  commonly,  if  not  always,  an  instantaneouy 
work."  Tyerman's  Life  of  Wesley,  i.  463. 

All  this  while  the  more  usual  sects  of  Protestantism  have 
set  no  such  store  by  instantaneous  conversion.  For  them  as 
for  the  Catholic  Church,  Christ's  blood,  the  sacraments,  and 
the  individual's  ordinary  religious  duties  are  practically  sup- 
posed to  suffice  to  his  salvation,  even  though  no  acute  crisis 
of  self-despair  and  surrender  followed  by  relief  should  be 
experienced.  For  Methodism,  on  the  contrary,  unless  there 
have  been  a  crisis  of  this  sort,  salvation  is  only  offered,  not 
effectively  received,  and  Christ's  sacrifice  in  so  far  forth  is 
incomplete.  Methodism  surely  here  follows,  if  not  the  health- 
ier-minded, yet  on  the  whole  the  profounder  spiritual  in- 
stinct. The  individual  models  which  it  has  set  up  as  typical 
and  worthy  of  imitation  are  not  only  the  more  interesting 
dramatically,  but  psychologically  they  have  been  the  more 
complete. 

In  the  fully  evolved  Revivalism  of  Great  Britain  and 
America  we  have,  so  to  speak,  the  codified  and  stereotyped 
procedure  to  which  this  way  of  thinking  has  led.  In  spite 
of  the  unquestionable  fact  that  saints  of  the  once-born  type 
exist,  that  there  may  be  a  gradual  growth  in  holiness  with- 
out a  cataclysm;  in  spite  of  the  obvious  leakage  (as  one  may 


224       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

say)  of  much  mere  natural  goodness  into  the  scheme  of  sal- 
vation; revivalism  has  always  assumed  that  only  its  own 
type  of  religious  experience  can  be  perfect;  you  must  first  be 
nailed  on  the  cross  of  natural  despair  and  agony,  and  then 
in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye  be  miraculously  released. 

It  is  natural  that  those  who  personally  have  traversed  such 
an  experience  should  carry  away  a  feeling  of  its  being  a 
miracle  rather  than  a  natural  process.  Voices  are  often  heard, 
lights  seen,  or  visions  witnessed;  automatic  motor  phenom- 
ena occur;  and  it  always  seems,  after  the  surrender  of  the 
personal  will,  as  if  an  extraneous  higher  power  had  flooded 
m  and  taken  possession.  Moreover  the  sense  of  renovation, 
safety,  cleanness,  Tightness,  can  be  so  marvelous  and  jubilant 
as  well  to  warrant  one's  belief  in  a  radically  new  substantial 
nature. 

"Conversion,"  writes  the  New  England  Puritan,  Joseph  Al- 
(eine,  "is  not  the  putting  in  a  patch  of  holiness;  but  with  the  true 
convert  holiness  is  woven  into  all  his  powers,  principles,  and 
practice.  The  sincere  Christian  is  quite  a  new  fabric,  from  the 
foundation  to  the  top-stone.  He  is  a  new  man,  a  new  creature." 

And  Jonathan  Edwards  says  in  the  same  strain:  "Those  gra- 
cious influences  which  are  the  effects  of  the  Spirit  of  God  are 
altogether  supernatural — are  quite  different  from  anything  that 
unregenerate  men  experience.  They  are  what  no  improvement, 
or  composition  of  natural  qualifications  or  principles  will  ever 
produce;  because  they  not  only  differ  from  what  is  natural,  and 
from  everything  that  natural  men  experience  in  degree  and  cir- 
cumstances, but  also  in  kind,  and  are  of  a  nature  far  more  ex- 
cellent. From  hence  it  follows  that  in  gracious  affections  there 
are  [also]  new  perceptions  and  sensations  entirely  different  in 
their  nature  and  kind  from  anything  experienced  by  the  [same] 
saints  before  they  were  sanctified.  .  .  .  The  conceptions  which 
the  saints  have  of  the  loveliness  of  God,  and  that  kind  of  delight 
which  they  experience  in  it,  are  quite  peculiar,  and  entirely  dif- 
ferent from  anything  which  a  natural  man  can  possess,  or  of 
which  he  can  form  any  proper  notion." 


CONVERSION  225 

And  that  such  a  glorious  transformation  as  this  ought  of 
necessity  to  be  preceded  by  despair  is  shown  by  Edwards  in 
another  passage. 

"Surely  it  cannot  be  unreasonable,"  he  says,  "that  before  God 
delivers  us  from  a  state  of  sin  and  liability  to  everlasting  woe, 
he  should  give  us  some  considerable  sense  of  the  evil  from 
which  he  delivers  us,  in  order  that  we  may  know  and  feel  the 
importance  of  salvation,  and  be  enabled  to  appreciate  the  value 
of  what  God  is  pleased  to  do  for  us.  As  those  who  are  saved 
are  successively  in  two  extremely  different  states — first  in  a  state 
of  condemnation  and  then  in  a  state  of  justification  and  blessed- 
ness— and  as  God,  in  the  salvation  of  men,  deals  with  them  as 
rational  and  intelligent  creatures,  it  appears  agreeable  to  this 
wisdom,  that  those  who  are  saved  should  be  made  sensible  of 
their  Being,  in  those  two  different  states.  In  the  first  place,  that 
they  should  be  made  sensible  of  their  state  of  condemnation; 
and  afterwards,  of  their  state  of  deliverance  and  happiness." 

Such  quotations  express  sufficiently  well  for  our  purpose 
the  doctrinal  interpretation  of  these  changes.  Whatever  part 
suggestion  and  imitation  may  have  played  in  producing 
them  in  men  and  women  in  excited  assemblies,  they  have  at 
any  rate  been  in  countless  individual  instances  an  original 
and  unborrowed  experience.  Were  we  writing  the  story  ol 
the  mind  from  the  purely  natural-history  point  of  view,  with 
no  religious  interest  whatever,  we  should  still  have  to  write 
down  man's  liability  to  sudden  and  complete  conversion  as 
one  of  his  most  curious  peculiarities. 

What,  now,  must  we  ourselves  think  of  this  question.''  Is 
an  instantaneous  conversion  a  miracle  in  which  God  is  pres- 
ent as  he  is  present  in  no  change  of  heart  less  strikingly  ab- 
rupt.'' Are  there  two  classes  of  human  beings,  even  among 
the  apparently  regenerate,  of  which  the  one  class  really  par- 
takes of  Christ's  nature  while  the  other  merely  seems  to  do 
so  ?  Or,  on  the  contrary,  may  the  whole  phenomenon  of  rf. 


*26       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

generation,  even  in  these  startling  instantaneous  examples, 
possibly  be  a  strictly  natural  process,  divine  in  its  fruits,  of 
course,  but  in  one  case  more  and  in  another  less  so,  and 
neither  more  nor  less  divine  in  its  mere  causation  and  mech- 
anism than  any  other  process,  high  or  low,  of  man's  interior 
life? 

Before  proceeding  to  answer  this  question,  I  must  ask  you 
to  listen  to  some  more  psychological  remarks.  At  our  last  lec- 
ture, I  explained  the  shifting  of  men's  centres  of  personal 
energy  within  them  and  the  lighting  up  of  new  crises  of 
emotion.  I  explained  the  phenomena  as  partly  due  to  expli- 
citly conscious  processes  of  thought  and  will,  but  as  due 
largely  also  to  the  subconscious  incubation  and  maturing  of 
motives  deposited  by  the  experiences  of  life.  When  ripe,  the 
results  hatch  out,  or  burst  into  flower.  I  have  now  to  speak 
af  the  subconscious  region,  in  which  such  processes  of  flow- 
ering may  occur,  in  a  somewhat  less  vague  way.  I  only  re- 
gret that  my  limits  of  time  here  force  me  to  be  so  short. 

The  expression  "field  of  consciousness"  has  but  recently 
come  into  vogue  in  the  psychology  books.  Until  quite  lately 
the  unit  of  mental  life  which  figured  most  was  the  single 
"idea,"  supposed  to  be  a  definitely  outlined  thing.  But  at 
present  psychologists  are  tending,  first,  to  admit  that  the 
actual  unit  is  more  probably  the  total  mental  state,  the  entire 
wave  of  consciousness  or  field  of  objects  present  to  the 
thought  at  any  time;  and,  second,  to  see  that  it  is  impossible 
to  outline  this  wave,  this  field,  with  any  definiteness. 

As  our  mental  fields  succeed  one  another,  each  has  its  cen- 
tre of  interest,  around  which  the  objects  of  which  we  are  less 
and  less  attentively  conscious  fade  to  a  margin  so  faint  that 
its  limits  are  unassignable.  Some  fields  are  narrow  fields  and 
some  are  wide  fields.  Usually  when  we  have  a  wide  field  we 
rejoice,  for  we  then  see  masses  of  truth  together,  and  often 
get  ghmpses  of  relations  which  we  divine  rather  than  see, 
for  they  shoot  beyond  the  field  into  still  remoter  regions  cf 


CONVERSION  •  227 

objectivity,  regions  which  we  seem  rather  to  be  about  to  per- 
ceive than  to  perceive  actually.  At  other  times,  of  drowsi- 
ness, illness,  or  fatigue,  our  fields  may  narrow  almost  to  a 
point,  and  we  find  ourselves  correspondingly  oppressed  and 
contracted. 

Different  individuals  present  constitutional  differences  in 
this  matter  of  width  of  field.  Your  great  organizing  gen- 
iuses are  men  with  habitually  vast  fields  of  mental  vision,  in 
which  a  whole  programme  of  future  operations  will  appear 
dotted  out  at  once,  the  rays  shooting  far  ahead  into  definite 
directions  of  advance.  In  common  people  there  is  never  this 
magnificent  inclusive  view  of  a  topic.  They  stumble  along, 
feeling  their  way,  as  it  were,  from  point  to  point,  and  often 
stop  entirely.  In  certain  diseased  conditions  consciousness  is 
a  mere  spark,  without  memory  of  the  past  or  thought  of  the 
future,  and  with  the  present  narrowed  down  to  ome  one 
simple  emotion  or  sensation  of  the  body. 

The  important  fact  which  this  "field"  formula  commem- 
orates is  the  indetermination  of  the  margin.  Inattentively 
realized  as  is  the  matter  which  the  margin  contains,  it  is 
nevertheless  there,  and  helps  both  to  guide  our  behavior  and 
to  determine  the  next  movement  of  our  attention.  It  lies 
around  us  like  a  "magnetic  field,"  inside  of  which  our  centre 
of  energy  turns  like  a  compass-needle,  as  the  present  phase 
of  consciousness  alters  into  its  successor.  Our  whole  past 
store  of  memories  floats  beyond  this  margin,  ready  at  a 
touch  to  come  in;  and  the  entire  mass  of  residual  powers, 
impulses,  and  knowledges  that  constitute  our  empirical  self 
stretches  continuously  beyond  it.  So  vaguely  drawn  are  the 
outlines  between  what  is  actual  and  what  is  only  potential 
at  any  moment  of  our  conscious  life,  that  it  is  always  hard  to 
say  of  certain  mental  elements  whether  we  are  conscious  of 
them  or  not. 

The  ordinary  psychology,  admitting  fully  the  difficulty  of 
tracing  the   marginal  outline,  has   nevertheless   taken   for 


128       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

granted,  first,  that  all  the  consciousness  the  person  now  has, 
be  the  same  focal  or  marginal,  inattentive  or  attentive,  is 
there  in  the  "field"  of  the  moment,  all  dim  and  impossible 
to  assign  as  the  latter's  outline  may  be;  and,  second,  that 
what  is  absolutely  extra-marginal  is  absolutely  non-existent, 
and  cannot  be  a  fact  of  consciousness  at  all. 

And  having  reached  this  point,  I  must  now  ask  you  to 
recall  what  I  said  in  my  last  lecture  about  the  subconscious 
life.  I  said,  as  you  may  recollect,  that  those  who  first  laid 
stress  upon  these  phenomena  could  not  know  the  facts  as  we 
now  know  them.  My  first  duty  now  is  to  tell  you  what  I 
meant  by  such  a  statement. 

I  cannot  but  think  that  the  most  important  step  forward 
that  has  occurred  in  psychology  since  I  have  been  a  student 
of  that  science  is  the  discovery,  first  made  in  1886,  that,  in 
certain  subjects  at  least,  there  is  not  only  the  consciousness 
of  the  ordinary  field,  with  its  usual  centre  and  margin,  but 
an  addition  thereto  in  the  shape  of  a  set  of  memories, 
thoughts,  and  feelings  which  are  extra-marginal  and  outside 
of  the  primary  consciousness  altogether,  but  yet  must  be 
classed  as  conscious  facts  of  some  sort,  able  to  reveal  their 
presence  by  unmistakable  signs.  I  call  this  the  most  impor- 
tant step  forward  because,  unlike  the  other  advances  which 
psychology  has  made,  this  discovery  has  revealed  to  us  an 
entirely  unsuspected  peculiarity  in  the  constitution  of  hu- 
man nature.  No  other  step  forward  which  psychology  has 
made  can  profFer  any  such  claim  as  this. 

In  particular  this  discovery  of  a  consciousness  existing  be- 
yond the  field,  or  subliminally  as  Mr.  Myers  terms  it,  casts 
light  on  many  phenomena  of  religious  biography.  That  is 
why  I  have  to  advert  to  it  now,  although  it  is  naturally  im- 
possible for  me  in  this  place  to  give  you  any  account  of  the 
evidence  on  which  the  admission  of  such  a  consciousness  is 
based.  You  will  find  it  set  forth  in  many  recent  books. 


CONVERSION  229 

Binet's  Alterations  of  Personality  ^  being  perhaps  as  good 
a  one  as  any  to  recommend. 

The  human  material  on  which  the  demonstration  has 
been  made  has  so  far  been  rather  limited  and,  in  part  at 
least,  eccentric,  consisting  of  unusually  suggestible  hypnotic 
subjects,  and  of  hysteric  patients.  Yet  the  elementary  mech- 
anisms of  our  life  are  presumably  so  uniform  that  what  is 
shown  to  be  true  in  a  marked  degree  of  some  persons  is  prob- 
ably true  in  some  degree  of  all,  and  may  in  a  few  be  true  in 
an  extraordinarily  high  degree. 

The  most  important  consequence  of  having  a  strongly  de- 
veloped ultra-marginal  life  of  this  sort  is  that  one's  ordinary 
fields  of  consciousness  are  liable  to  incursions  from  it  of 
which  the  subject  does  not  guess  the  source,  and  which, 
therefore,  take  for  him  the  form  of  unaccountable  impulses 
to  act,  or  inhibitions  of  action,  of  obsessive  ideas,  or  even  of 
hallucinations  of  sight  or  hearing.  The  impulses  may  take 
the  direction  of  automatic  speech  or  writing,  the  meaning  of 
which  the  subject  himself  may  not  understand  even  while  he 
utters  it;  and  generalizing  this  phenomenon,  Mr.  Myers  has 
given  the  name  of  automatism,  sensory  or  motor,  emotional 
or  intellectual,  to  this  whole  sphere  of  eflects,  due  to  "up^ 
rushes"  into  the  ordinary  consciousness  of  energies  original' 
ing  in  the  subliminal  parts  of  the  mind. 

The  simplest  instance  of  an  automatism  is  the  phenome- 
non of  post-hypnotic  suggestion,  so-called.  You  give  to  a  hyp- 
notized subject,  adequately  susceptible,  an  order  to  perfornr 
some  designated  act — usual  or  eccentric,  it  makes  no  differ 
ence — after  he  wakes  from  his  hypnotic  sleep.  Punctually, 
when  the  signal  comes  or  the  time  elapses  upon  which  you 
have  told  him  that  the  act  must  ensue,  he  performs  it; — but 
in  so  doing  he  has  no  recollection  of  your  suggestion,  and  he 
always  trumps  up  an  improvised  pretext  for  his  behavior  if 

^  Published  in  the  International  Scientific  Series. 


230      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

the  act  be  of  an  eccentric  kind.  It  may  even  be  suggested  to  a 
subject  to  have  a  vision  or  to  hear  a  voice  at  a  certain  interval 
after  waking,  and  when  the  time  comes  the  vision  is  seen  or 
the  voice  heard,  with  no  inkUng  on  the  subject's  part  of  its 
source.  In  the  wonderful  explorations  by  Binet,  Janet,  Breuer, 
Freud,  Mason,  Prince,  and  others,  of  the  subliminal  con- 
sciousness of  patients  with  hysteria,  we  have  revealed  to  us 
whole  systems  of  underground  life,  in  the  shape  of  mem- 
ories of  a  painful  sort  which  lead  a  parasitic  existence,  buried 
outside  of  the  primary  fields  of  consciousness,  and  making 
irruptions  thereinto  with  hallucinations,  pains,  convulsions, 
paralyses  of  feeling  and  of  motion,  and  the  whole  procession 
of  symptoms  of  hysteric  disease  of  body  and  of  mind.  Alter  or 
abolish  by  suggestion  these  subconscious  memories,  and  the 
patient  immediately  gets  well.  His  symptoms  were  auto- 
matisms, in  Mr.  Myers's  sense  of  the  word.  These  clinical 
records  sound  like  fairy-tales  when  one  first  reads  them,  yet 
it  is  impossible  to  doubt  their  accuracy;  and,  the  path  having 
been  once  opened  by  these  first  observers,  similar  observa- 
tions have  been  made  elsewhere.  They  throw,  as  I  said,  a 
wholly  new  light  upon  our  natural  constitution. 

And  it  seems  to  me  that  they  make  a  farther  step  inevi- 
table. Interpreting  the  unknown  after  the  analogy  of  the 
known,  it  seems  to  me  that  hereafter,  wherever  we  meet 
with  a  phenomenon  of  automatism,  be  it  motor  impulses, 
or  obsessive  idea,  or  unaccountable  caprice,  or  delusion,  or 
hallucination,  we  are  bound  first  of  all  to  make  search 
whether  it  be  not  an  explosion,  into  the  fields  of  ordinary 
consciousness,  of  ideas  elaborated  outside  of  those  fields  in 
subliminal  regions  of  the  mind.  We  should  look,  therefore, 
for  its  source  in  the  Subject's  subconscious  life.  In  the  hyp- 
notic cases,  we  ourselves  create  the  source  by  our  sugges- 
tion, so  we  know  it  directly.  In  the  hysteric  cases,  the  lost 
memories  which  are  the  source  have  to  be  extracted  from 
the  patient's  Subliminal  by  a  number  of  ingenious  methods, 


CONVERSION  231 

for  an  account  of  which  you  must  consult  the  books.  In 
other  pathological  cases,  insane  delusions,  for  example,  or 
psychopathic  obsessions,  the  source  is  yet  to  seek,  but  by 
analogy  it  also  should  be  in  subliminal  regions  which  im- 
provements in  our  methods  may  yet  conceivably  put  on  tap. 
There  lies  the  mechanism  logically  to  be  assumed — but  the 
assumption  involves  a  vast  program  of  work  to  be  done  in 
the  way  of  verification,  in  which  the  religious  experiences 
of  man  must  play  their  part.-^ 

*The  reader  will  here  please  notice  that  in  my  exclusive  reliance 
in  the  last  lecture  on  the  subconscious  "incubation"  of;  motives  de- 
posited by  a  growing  experience,  I  followed  the  method  of  em- 
ploying accepted  principles  of  explanation  as  far  as  one  can.  The 
subliminal  region,  whatever  else  it  may  be,  is  at  any  rate  a  place 
now  admitted  by  psychologists  to  exist  for  the  accumulation  of 
vesdges  of  sensible  experience  (whether  inattendvely  or  attendvely 
registered),  and  for  their  elaboration  according  to  ordinary  psy- 
chological or  logical  laws  into  results  that  end  by  attaining  such  a 
"tension"  that  they  may  at  times  enter  consciousness  with  something 
like  a  burst.  It  thus  is  "scientific"  to  interpret  all  otherwise  unac- 
countable  invasive  alterations  of  consciousness  as  results  of  the  ten- 
sion of  subliminal  memories  reaching  the  bursting-point.  But  candor 
obliges  me  to  confess  that  there  are  occasional  bursts  into  conscious- 
ness of  results  of  which  it  is  not  easy  to  demonstrate  any  prolonged 
subconscious  incubation.  Some  of  the  cases  I  used  to  illustiate  the 
sense  of  presence  of  the  unseen  in  Lecture  III  were  of  this  order 
(compare  pages  59,  60,  61,  66);  and  we  shall  see  other  experience:; 
of  the  kind  when  we  come  to  the  subject  of  mysticism.  The  case  of 
Mr.  Bradley,  that  of  M.  RaUsbonne,  possibly  that  of  Colonel  Gardi- 
ner, possibly  that  of  Saint  Paul,  might  not  be  so  easily  explained  in 
this  simple  way.  The  result,  then,  would  have  to  be  ascribed  either 
to  a  merely  physiological  nerve  storm,  a  "discharging  lesion"  like 
that  of  epilepsy;  or,  in  case  it  were  useful  and  rational,  as  in  the  two 
latter  cases  named,  to  some  more  mystical  or  theological  hypothesis. 
I  make  this  remark  in  order  that  the  reader  may  realize  that  the  sub- 
ject is  really  complex.  But  I  shall  keep  myself  as  far  as  possible  at 
present  to  the  more  "scientific"  view;  and  only  as  the  plot  thickens 
in  subsequent  lectures  shall  I  consider  the  question  of  its  absolute  suf- 
ficiency as  an  explanation  of  all  the  facts.  That  subconscious  incuba- 
tion explains  a  great  number  of  them,  thers  can  be  no  doubt. 


232       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

And  thus  I  return  to  our  own  specific  subject  of  instan- 
taneous conversions.  You  remember  the  cases  of  Alline, 
Bradley,  Brainerd,  and  the  graduate  of  Oxford  converted  at 
three  in  the  afternoon.  Similar  occurrences  abound,  some 
with  and  some  without  luminous  visions,  all  with  a  sense  of 
astonished  happiness,  and  of  being  wrought  on  by  a  higher 
control.  If,  abstracting  altogether  from  the  question  of  their 
value  for  the  future  spiritual  life  of  the  individual,  we  take 
them  on  their  psychological  side  exclusively,  so  many  pe- 
culiarities in  them  remind  us  of  what  we  find  outside  of 
conversion  that  we  are  tempted  to  class  them  along  with 
other  automatisms,  and  to  suspect  that  what  makes  the  dif- 
ference between  a  sudden  and  a  gradual  convert  is  not  nec- 
essarily the  presence  of  divine  miracle  in  the  case  of  one  and 
of  something  less  divine  in  that  of  the  other,  but  rather  a 
simple  psychological  peculiarity,  the  fact,  namely,  that  in 
the  recipient  of  the  more  instantaneous  grace  we  have  one  of 
those  Subjects  who  are  in  possession  of  a  large  region  in 
which  mental  work  can  go  on  subliminally,  and  from  which 
invasive  experiences,  abruptly  upsetting  the  equilibrium  of 
the  primary  consciousness,  may  come. 

I  do  not  see  why  Methodists  need  object  to  such  a  view. 
Pray  go  back  and  recollect  one  of  the  conclusions  to  which 
I  sought  to  lead  you  in  my  very  first  lecture.  You  may  re- 
member how  I  there  argued  against  the  notion  that  the 
worth  of  a  thing  can  be  decided  by  its  origin.  Our  spiritual 
judgment,  I  said,  our  opinion  of  the  significance  and  value 
of  a  human  event  or  condition,  must  be  decided  on  empiri- 
cal grounds  exclusively.  If  the  jriiits  for  life  of  the  state  of 
conversion  are  good,  we  ought  to  idealize  and  venerate  it, 
even  though  it  be  a  piece  of  natural  psychology;  if  not,  we 
ought  to  make  short  work  with  it,  no  matter  what  super- 
natural being  may  have  infused  it. 

Well,  how  is  it  with  these  fruits?  If  we  except  the  class  of 
preeminent  saints  of  whom  the  names  illumine  history,  and 


CONVERSION  233 

consider  only  the  usual  run  of  "saints,"  the  shopkeeping 
church-members  and  ordinary  youthful  or  middle-aged  re- 
cipients of  instantaneous  conversion,  whether  at  revivals  or 
in  the  spontaneous  course  of  methodistic  growth,  you  will 
probably  agree  that  no  splendor  worthy  of  a  wholly  super- 
natural creature  fulgurates  from  them,  or  sets  them  apart 
from  the  mortals  who  have  never  experienced  that  favor. 
Were  it  true  that  a  suddenly  converted  man  as  such  is,  as 
Edwards  says,^  of  an  entirely  different  kind  from  a  natural 
man,  partaking  as  he  does  directly  of  Christ's  substance, 
there  surely  ought  to  be  some  exquisite  class-mark,  some 
distinctive  radiance  attaching  even  to  the  lowliest  specimen 
of  this  genus,  to  which  no  one  of  us  could  remain  insensible, 
and  which,  so  far  as  it  went,  would  prove  him  more  excel- 
lent than  ever  the  most  highly  gifted  among  mere  natural 
men.  But  notoriously  there  is  no  such  radiance.  Converted 
men  as  a  class  are  indistinguishable  from  natural  men; 
some  natural  men  even  excel  some  converted  men  in  their 
fruits;  and  no  one  ignorant  of  doctrinal  theology  could 
guess  by  mere  every-day  inspection  of  the  "accidents"  of  the 
two  groups  of  persons  before  him,  that  their  substance  dif 
fered  as  much  as  divine  differs  from  human  substance. 

The  believers  in  the  non-natural  character  of  sudden  con 
version  have  had  practically  to  admit  that  there  is  no  un- 
mistakable class-mark  distinctive  of  all  true  converts.  The 
super-normal  incidents,  such  as  voices  and  visions  and  over- 
{X)wering  impressions  of  the  meaning  of  suddenly  presented 
scripture  texts,  the  melting  emotions  and  tumultuous  affec- 
tions connected  with  the  crisis  of  change,  may  all  come  by 
way  of  nature,  or  worse  still,  be  counterfeited  by  Satan.  The 

^  Edwards  says  elsewhere:  "I  am  bold  to  say  that  the  work  of  God 
in  the  conversion  of  one  soul,  considered  together  with  the  source, 
foundation,  and  purchase  of  it,  and  also  the  benefit,  end,  and  eternal 
issue  of  it,  is  a  more  glorious  work  of  God  than  the  creation  of  (he 
whole    material    universe." 


234       THE   VARIETIES    OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

real  witness  of  the  spirit  to  the  second  birth  is  to  be  found 
only  in  the  disposition  of  the  genuine  child  of  God,  the  per- 
manently patient  heart,  the  love  of  self  eradicated.  And  this, 
it  has  to  be  admitted,  is  also  found  in  those  who  pass  no 
crisis,  and  may  even  be  found  outside  of  Christianity  al- 
together. 

Throughout  Jonathan  Edwards's  admirably  rich  and  deli- 
cate description  of  the  supernaturally  infused  condition,  in 
his  Treatise  on  Religious  Afifections,  there  is  not  one  decis- 
ive trait,  not  one  mark,  that  unmistakably  parts  it  of?  from 
what  may  possibly  be  only  an  exceptionally  high  degree  of 
natural  goodness.  In  fact,  one  could  hardly  read  a  clearer 
argument  than  this  book  unwittingly  offers  in  favor  of  the 
thesis  that  no  chasm  exists^between  the  orders  of  human  ex- 
cellence, but  that  here  as  elsewhere,  nature  shows  continu- 
ous differences,  and  generation  and  regeneration  are  matters 
of  degree. 

All  which  denial  of  two  objective  classes  of  human  beings 
separated  by  a  chasm  must  not  leave  us  blind  to  the  extra- 
ordinary momentousness  of  the  fact  of  his  conversion  to  the 
individual  himself  who  gets  converted.  There  are  higher 
and  lower  limits  of  possibility  set  to  each  personal  life.  If  a 
flood  but  goes  above  one's  head,  its  absolute  elevation  be- 
comes a  matter  of  small  importance;  and  when  we  touch 
our  own  upper  limit  and  live  in  our  own  highest  centre  of 
energy,  we  may  call  ourselves  saved,  no  matter  how  much 
higher  some  one  else's  centre  may  be.  A  small  man's  salva- 
tion will  always  be  a  great  salvation  and  the  greatest  of  all 
facts  jor  him,  and  we  should  remember  this  when  the  fruits 
of  our  ordinary  evangelicism  look  discouraging.  Who 
knows  how  much  less  ideal  still  the  lives  of  these  spiritual 
grubs  and  earthworms,  these  Crumps  and  Stigginses,  might 
have  been,  if  such  poor  grace  as  they  have  received  had 
never  touched  them  at  all?  ^ 

^  Emerson  writes:  "When  we  see  a  soul  whose  acts  are  regal,  grace- 


CONVERSION  235 

If  we  roughly  arrange  human  beings  in  classes,  each  class 
standing  for  a  grade  of  spiritual  excellence,  I  beHeve  we 
shall  find  natural  men  and  converts  both  sudden  and  grad- 
ual in  all  the  classes.  The  forms  which  regenerative  change 
eflfects  have,  then,  no  general  spiritual  significance,  but  only 
a  psychological  significance.  We  have  seen  how  Starbuck's 
laborious  statistical  studies  tend  to  assimilate  conversion  to 
ordinary  spiritual  growth.  Another  American  psychologist, 
Prof.  George  A.  Coe,^  has  analyzed  the  cases  of  seventy- 
seven  converts  or  ex-candidates  for  conversion,  knovv^n  to 
him,  and  the  results  strikingly  confirm  the  view  that  sudden 
conversion  is  connected  with  the  possession  of  an  active 
subliminal  self.  Examining  his  subjects  with  reference  to 
their  hypnotic  sensibility  and  to  such  automatisms  as  hyp- 
nagogic hallucinations,  odd  impulses,  religious  dreams  about 
the  time  of  their  conversion,  etc.,  he  found  these  relatively 
much  more  frequent  in  the  group  of  converts  whose  trans- 
formation had  been  "striking,"  "striking"  transformation  be- 
ing defined  as  a  change  which,  though  not  necessarily  in- 
stantaneous, seems  to  the  subject  of  it  to  be  distinctly  dif- 
ferent, from  a  process  of  growth,  however  rapid."  "  Candi- 
dates for  conversion  at  revivals  are,  as  you  know,  often 
disappointed:  they  experience  nothing  striking.  Professor 
Coe  had  a  number  of  persons  of  this  class  among  his  sev- 
enty-seven subjects,  and  they  almost  all,  when  tested  by  hyp- 

ful  and  pleasant  as  roses,  we  must  thank  God  that  such  things  can  be 
and  are,  and  not  turn  sourly  on  the  angel  and  say:  Crump  is  a  better 
man,  with  his  grunting  resistance  to  all  his  native  devils."  True 
enough.  Yet  Crump  may  really  be  the  better  Crump,  for  his  inner 
discords  and  second  birth;  and  your  once-born  "regal"  character, 
though  indeed  always  better  than  poor  Crump,  may  fall  far  short  of 
what  he  individually  might  be  had  he  only  some  Crump-like  capacity 
for  compunction  over  his  own  peculiar  diabolisms,  graceful  anc* 
pleasant  and  invariably  gentlemanly  as  these  may  be. 

^  In  his  book,  The  Spiritual  Life,  New  York,  1900, 

-Op.  cit.,  p.  112. 


236       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

notism,  proved  to  belong  to  a  subclass  which  he  calls  "spon- 
taneous," that  is,  fertile  in  self-suggestions,  as  distinguished 
from  a  "passive"  subclass,  to  which  most  of  the  subjects  of 
striking  transformation  belonged.  His  inference  is  that  self- 
suggestion  of  impossibility  had  prevented  the  influence  upon 
these  persons  of  an  environment  which,  on  the  more  "pas- 
sive" subjects,  had  easily  brought  forth  the  effects  they 
looked  for.  Sharp  distinctions  are  difficult  in, these  regions, 
and  Professor  Coe's  numbers  are  small.  But  his  methods 
were  careful,  and  the  results  tally  with  what  one  might  ex- 
pect; and  they  seem,  on  the  whole,  to  justify  his  practical 
conclusion,  which  is  that  if  you  should  expose  to  a  con- 
verting influence  a  subject  in  whom  three  factors  unite: 
first,  pronounced  emotional  sensibility;  second,  tendency  to 
automatisms;  and  third,  suggestibility  of  the  passive  type; 
you  might  then  safely  predict  the  result:  there  would  be  a 
sudden  conversion,  a  transformation  of  the  striking  kind. 

Does  this  temperamental  origin  diminish  the  significance 
of  the  sudden  conversion  when  it  has  occurred?  Not  in  the 
least,  as  Professor  Coe  well  says;  for  "the  ultimate  test  of 
religious  values  is  nothing  psychological,  nothing  definable 
in  terms  of  how  it  happens,  but  something  ethical,  definable 
only  in  terms  of  what  is  attained."  ^ 

As  we  proceed  farther  in  our  inquiry  we  shall  see  that 
what  is  attained  is  often  an  altogether  new  level  of  spiritual 
vitality,  a  relatively  heroic  level,  in  which  impossible  things 
have  become  possible,  and  new  energies  and  endurances  are 
shown.  The  personality  is  changed,  the  man  is  born  anew, 
whether  or  not  his  psychological  idiosyncrasies  are  what 
give  the  particular  shape  to  his  metamorphosis.  "Sanctifica- 
tion"  is  the  technical  name  of  this  result;  and  erelong  ex- 
amples of  it  shall  be  brought  before  you.  In  this  lecture  I 
have  still  only  to  add  a  few  remarks  on  the  assurance  and 
peace  which  fill  the  hour  of  change  itself. 

^  Op.  cit.,  p.  144. 


CONVERSION  237 

One  word  more,  though,  before  proceeding  to  that  point, 
lest  the  final  purpose  of  my  explanation  of  suddenness  by 
subliminal  activity  be  misunderstood.  I  do  indeed  believe 
that  if  the  Subject  have  no  liability  to  such  subconscious  ac- 
tivity, or  if  his  conscious  fields  have  a  hard  rind  of  a  margin 
that  resists  incursions  from  beyond  it,  his  conversion  must 
be  gradual  if  it  occur,  and  must  resemble  any  simple  growth 
into  new  habits.  His  possession  of  a  developed  subliminal 
self,  and  of  a  leaky  or  pervious  margin,  is  thus  a  conditio 
sine  qua  non  of  the  Subject's  becoming  converted  in  the 
instantaneous  way.  But  if  you,  being  orthodox  Christians, 
ask  me  as  a  psychologist  whether  the  reference  of  a  phe- 
nomenon to  a  subliminal  self  does  not  exclude  the  notion  of 
the  direct  presence  of  the  Deity  altogether,  I  have  to  say 
frankly  that  as  a  psychologist  I  do  not  see  why  it  necessarily 
should.  The  lower  manifestations  of  the  Subliminal,  indeed^ 
fall  within  the  resources  of  the  personal  subject:  his  ordi- 
nary  sense-material,  inattentively  taken  in  and  subconscious- 
ly remembered  and  combined,  will  account  for  all  his  usual 
automatisms.  But  just  as  our  primary  wide-awake  conscious- 
ness throws  open  our  senses  to  the  touch  of  things  material, 
so  it  is  logically  conceivable  that  //  there  be  higher  spiritual 
agencies  that  can  directly  touch  us,  the  psychological  condi- 
tion of  their  doing  so  might  be  our  possession  of  a  subcon- 
scious region  which  alone  should  yield  access  to  them.  The 
hubbub  of  the  waking  life  might  close  a  door  which  in  the 
dreamy  Subliminal  might  remain  ajar  or  open. 

Thus  that  perception  of  external  control  which  is  so  es- 
sential a  feature  in  conversion  might,  in  some  cases  at  any 
rate,  be  interpreted  as  the  orthodox  interpret  it:  forces  trans* 
cending  the  finite  individual  might  impress  him,  on  condi- 
tion of  his  being  what  we  may  call  a  subliminal  human, 
specimen.  But  in  any  case  the  value  of  these  forces  would 
have  to  be  determined  by  their  effects,  and  the  mere  fact  of 


238       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

their  transcr.ndency  would  of  itself  establish  no  presumption 
that  they  were  more  divine  than  diabolical. 

I  confess  that  this  is  the  way  in  which  I  should  rather  see 
the  topic  left  lying  in  your  minds  until  I  come  to  a  much 
later  lecture,  when  I  hope  once  m.ore  to  gather  these  dropped 
threads  together  into  more  definitive  conclusions.  The  no- 
tion of  a  subconscious  self  certainly  ought  not  at  this  point 
of  our  inquiry  to  be  held  to  exclude  all  notion  of  a  higher 
penetration.  If  there  be  higher  powers  able  to  impress  us, 
they  may  get  access  to  us  only  through  the  subliminal  door. 
(See  below,  p.  506  ff.) 

Let  us  turn  now  to  the  feelings  which  immediately  fill  the 
hour  of  the  conversion  experience.  The  first  one  to  be  noted 
is  just  this  sense  of  higher  control.  It  is  not  always,  but  it  is 
very  often  present.  We  saw  examples  of  it  in  AUine,  Brad- 
ley, Brainerd,  and  elsewhere.  The  need  of  such  a  higher 
controlling  agency  is  well  expressed  in  the  short  reference 
which  the  eminent  French  Protestant  Adolphe  Monod 
makes  to  the  crisis  of  his  own  conversion.  It  was  at  Naples 
in  his  early  manhood,  in  the  summer  of  1827. 

"My  sadness,"  he  says,  "was  without  limit,  and  having  got 
entire  possession  of  me,  it  filled  my  life  from  the  most  indiffer- 
ent external  acts  to  the  most  secret  thoughts,  and  corrupted  at 
their  scvurce  my  feelings,  my  judgment,  and  my  happiness.  It 
was  then  that  I  saw  that  to  expect  to  put  a  stop  to  this  disorder 
by  my  reason  and  my  v/ill,  which  were  themselves  diseased, 
would  be  to  act  like  a  blir^d  man  who  should  pretend  to  correct 
one  of  his  eyes  by  the  aid  of  the  other  equally  blind  one.  I  had 
then  no  resource  save  in  some  influence  from  without.  I  remem- 
bered the  promise  of  the  Holy  Ghost;  and  what  the  positive 
declarations  of  the  Gospel  had  never  succeeded  in  bringing 
home  to  me,  I  learned  at  last  from  necessity,  and  believed,  for 
the  first  time  in  my  life,  in  this  promise,  in  the  only  sense  in 
which  it  answered  the  needs  of  my  soul,  in  that,  namely,  of  a 


CONVERSION  239 

real  external  supernatural  action,  capable  of  giving  me  thoughts, 
and  taking  them  away  from  me,  and  exerted  on  me  by  a  God  as 
truly  master  of  my  heart  as  he  is  of  the  rest  of  nature.  Renounc- 
ing then  all  merit,  all  strength,  abandoning  all  my  personal  re- 
sources, and  acknowledging  no  other  title  to  his  mercy  than  m^ 
own  utter  misery,  I  went  home  and  threw  myself  on  my  knees, 
and  prayed  as  I  never  yet  prayed  in  my  life.  From  this  day  on- 
wards a  new  interior  life  began  for  me:  not  that  my  melancholy 
had  disappeared,  but  it  had  lost  its  sting.  Hope  had  entered  into 
my  heart,  and  once  entered  on  the  path,  the  God  of  Jesus  Christ, 
to  whom  I  then  had  learned  to  give  myself  up,  little  by  little 
did  the  rest."  ^ 

It  is  needless  to  remind  you  once  more  of  the  admirable 
congruity  of  Protestant  theology  with  the  structure  of  thf 
mind  as  shown  in  such  experiences.  In  the  extreme  of  mel 
ancholy  the  self  that  consciously  is  can  do  absolutely  noth- 
ing. It  is  completely  bankrupt  and  without  resource,  and  no 
works  it  can  accomplish  will  avail.  Redemption  from  such 
subjective  conditions  must  be  a  free  gift  or  nothing,  and 
grace  through  Christ's  accomplished  sacrifice  is  such  a  gift. 

"God,"  says  Luther,  "is  the  God  of  the  humble,  the  miser- 
able, the  oppressed,  and  the  desperate,  and  of  those  that  are 
brought  even  to  nothing;  and  his  nature  is  to  give  sight  to  the 
blind,  to  comfort  the  broken-hearted,  to  justify  sinners,  to  save 
the  very  desperate  and  damned.  Now  that  pernicious  and  pesti- 
lent opinion  of  man's  own  righteousness,  which  will  not  be  a 
sinner,  unclean,  miserable,  and  damnable,  but  righteous  and 
holy,  suffereth  not  God  to  come  to  his  own  natural  and  proper 
work.  Therefore  God  must  take  this  maul  in  hand  (the  law,  I 
mean)  to  beat  in  pieces  and  bring  to  nothing  this  beast  with  her 
vain  confidence,  that  she  may  so  learn  at  length  by  her  own  mis- 
ery that  she  is  utterly  forlorn  and  damned.  But  here  lieth  the 
difficulty,  that  when  a  man  is  terrified  and  cast  down,  he  is  so 

1 1  piece  together  a  quotation  made  by  W.  Monod,  in  his  book  la 
Vit,  and  a  letter  printed  in  the  work:  Adoiphe  Monod:  I.,  Souvenirs 
de  sa  Vie,  1885,  p.  433. 


240       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

little  able  to  raise  himself  up  again  and  say,  'Now  I  am  bruised 
and  afflicted  enough;  now  is  the  time  of  grace;  now  is  the  time 
to  hear  Christ.'  The  foolishness  of  man's  heart  is  so  great  that 
then  he  rather  seeketh  to  himself  more  laws  to  satisfy  his  con- 
science. 'If  I  live,'  saith  he,  'I  will  amend  my  life:  I  will  do  this, 
I  will  do  that.'  But  here,  except  thou  do  the  quite  contrary,  ex- 
cept thou  send  Moses  away  with  his  law,  and  in  these  terrors 
and  this  anguish  lay  hold  upon  Christ  who  died  for  thy  sins, 
look  for  no  salvation.  Thy  cowl,  thy  shaven  crown,  thy  chastity, 
thy  obedience,  thy  poverty,  thy  works,  thy  merits?  what  shall 
all  these  do?  what  shall  the  law  of  Moses  avail?  If  I,  wretched 
and  damnable  sinner,  through  works  or  merits  could  have  loved 
the  Son  of  God,  and  so  come  to  him,  what  needed  he  to  deliver 
himself  for  me?  If  I,  being  a  wretch  and  damned  sinner,  could 
be  redeemed  by  any  other  price,  what  needed  the  Son  of  God  to 
be  given?  But  because  there  was  no  other  price,  therefore  he  de- 
livered neither  sheep,  ox,  gold,  nor  silver,  but  even  God  himself, 
entirely  and  wholly  'for  me,'  even  'for  me,'  I  say,  a  miserable, 
wretched  sinner.  Now,  therefore,  I  take  comfort  and  apply  this 
10  myself.  And  this  manner  of  applying  is  the  very  true  force 
and  power  of  faith.  For  he  died  not  to  justify  the  righteous,  but 
\he  ««-righteous,  and  to  make  tkem  the  children  of  God."  ^ 

That  is,  the  more  literally  lost  you  are,  the  more  literally 
you  are  the  very  being  whom  Christ's  sacrifice  has  already 
saved.  Nothing  in  Catholic  theology,  I  imagine,  has  ever 
spoken  to  sick  souls  as  straight  as  this  message  from  Lu- 
ther's personal  experience.  As  Protestants  are  not  all  sick 
souls,  of  course  reliance  on  what  Luther  exults  in  calling  the 
dung  of  one's  merits,  the  filthy  puddle  of  one's  own  right- 
eousness, has  come  to  the  front  again  in  their  religion;  but 
the  adequacy  of  his  view  of  Christianity  to  the  deeper  parts 
of  our  human  mental  structure  is  shown  by  its  wildfire  con- 
tagiousness when  it  was  a  new  and  quickening  thing. 
\       Faith  that  Christ  has  genuinely  done  his  work  was  part  of 

^  Commentary  on  Galatians,  ch.  iii.  verse  19,  and  ch.  ii.  verse  20, 
abridged. 


CONVERSION  241 

what  Luther  meant  by  faith,  which  so  far  is  faith  in  a  fact 
intellectually  conceived  of.  But  this  is  only  one  part  of  Lu- 
ther's faith,  the  other  part  being  far  more  vital.  This  othei 
part  is  something  not  intellectual  but  immediate  and  intui- 
tive, the  assurance,  namely,  that  I,  this  individual  I,  just  as 
I  stand,  without  one  plea,  etc.,  am  saved  now  and  forever.' 
Professor  Leuba  is  undoubtedly  right  in  contending  that 
the  conceptual  belief  about  Christ's  work,  although  so  often 
efficacious  and  antecedent,  is  really  accessory  and  non-es- 
sential, and  that  the  "joyous  conviction"  can  also  come  b)! 
far  other  channels  than  this  conception.  It  is  to  the  joyous 
conviction  itself,  the  assurance  that  all  is  well  with  one,  that 
he  would  give  the  name  of  faith  par  excellence. 

"When  the  sense  of  estrangement,"  he  writes,  "fencing  man 
about  in  a  narrowly  limited  ego,  breaks  down,  the  individual 
finds  himself  'at  one  with  all  creation.'  He  lives  in  the  universal 
life;  he  and  man,  he  and  nature,  he  and  God,  are  one.  That  state 
of  confidence,  trust,  union  with  all  things,  following  upon  the 
achievement  of  moral  unity,  is  the  Faith-state.  Various  dogmatic 

^  In  some  conversions,  both  steps  are  distinct;  in  this  one,  for 
example: — 

"Whilst  I  was  reading  the  evangelical  treatise,  I  was  soon  struck 
by  an  expression:  'the  finished  work  of  Christ.'  'Why,'  I  asked  of 
myself,  'does  the  author  use  these  terms?  Why  does  he  not  say  "the 
atoning  work"?'  Then  these  words,  'It  is  finished,'  presented  them- 
selves to  my  mind.  'What  is  it  that  is  finished?'  I  asked,  and  in  an 
instant  my  mind  replied:  'A  perfect  expiation  for  sin;  entire  satis- 
faction has  been  given;  the  debt  has  been  paid  by  the  Substitute. 
Christ  has  died  for  our  sins;  not  for  ours  only,  but  for  those  of  all 
men.  If,  then,  the  entire  work  is  finished,  all  the  debt  paid,  what 
remains  for  me  to  do?'  In  another  instant  the  light  was  shed  through 
my  mind  by  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  the  joyous  conviction  was  given 
me  that  nothing  more  was  to  be  done,  save  to  fall  on  my  knees,  to 
accept  this  Saviour  and  his  love,  to  praise  God  forever."  Autobiogra- 
phy of  Hudson  Taylor.  I  translate  back  into  English  from  the  French 
translation  of  Challand  (Geneva,  no  date),  the  original  not  being 
accessible. 


242       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

beliefs  suddenly,  on  the  advent  of  the  faith-state,  acquire  a  char- 
acter of  certainty,  assume  a  new  reality,  become  an  object  of 
faith.  As  the  ground  of  assurance  here  is  not  rational,  argumen- 
tation is  irrelevant.  But  such  conviction  being  a  mere  casual  off- 
shoot of  the  faith-state,  it  is  a  gross  error  to  imagine  that  the 
chief  practical  value  of  the  faith-state  is  its  power  to  stamp  with 
the  seal  of  reality  certain  particular  theological  conceptions.^  On 
the  contrary,  its  value  lies  solely  in  the  fact  that  it  is  the  psychic 
correlate  of  a  biological  gro\Mh  reducing  contending  desires  to 
one  direction;  a  growth  which  expresses  itself  in  new  affective 
states  and  new  reactions;  in  larger,  nobler,  more  Christ-like  ac- 
tivities. The  ground  of  the  specific  assurance  in  religious  dog- 
mas is  then  an  affective  experience.  The  objects  of  faith  may 
even  be  preposterous;  the  affective  stream  will  float  them  along, 
ind  invest  them  with  unshakable  certitude.  The  more  startling 
the  affective  experience,  the  less  explicable  it  seems,  the  easier  it 
is  to  make  it  the  carrier  of  unsubstantiated  notions."  ^ 

The  characteristics  of  the  affective  experience  which,  to 
avoid  ambiguity,  should,  I  think,  be  called  the  state  of  assur- 
ance rather  than  the  faith-state,  can  be  easily  enumerated, 
though  it  is  probably  difficult  to  realize  their  intensity,  un- 
less one  has  been  through  the  experience  one's  self. 

The  central  one  is  the  loss  of  all  the  worry,  the  sense 
that  all  is  ultimately  well  with  one,  the  peace,  the  harmony, 
the  willingness  to  be,  even  though  the  outer  conditions 
should  remain  the  same.  The  certainty  of  God's  "grace,"  of 
"justification,"  "salvation,"  is  an  objective  belief  that  usually 
accompanies  the  change  in  Christians;  but  this  may  be  en- 
tirely lacking  and  yet  the  affective  peace  remain  the  same 
—you  will  recollect  the  case  of  the  Oxford  graduate:  and 
,-nany  might  be  given  where  the  assurance  of  personal  sal- 

^  Tolstoy's  case  was  a  good  comment  on  those  words.  There  was 
almost  no  theology  in  his  conversion.  His  faith-state  was  the  sense 
come  back  that  life  was  infinite  in  its  moral  significance. 

-  American  Journal  of  Psychology,  vii.  345-347,  abridged. 


CONVERSION  243 

vation  was  only  a  later  result.  A  passion  of  willingness,  of 
acquiescence,  of  admiration,  is  the  glowing  centre  of  thii 
state  of  mind. 

The  second  feature  is  the  sense  of  perceiving  truths  no* 
known  before.  The  mysteries  of  life  become  lucid,  as  Pro- 
fessor  Leuba  says;  and  often,  nay  usually,  the  solution  if. 
more  or  less  unutterable  in  words.  But  these  more  intel- 
lectual phenomena  may  be  postponed  until  we  treat  of 
mysticism. 

A  third  peculiarity  of  the  assurance  state  is  the  objec- 
tive change  which  the  world  often  appears  to  undergo 
"An  appearance  of  newness  beautifies  every  object,"  the 
precise  opposite  of  that  other  sort  of  newness,  that  dread- 
ful unreality  and  strangeness  in  the  appearance  of  the 
world,  which  is  experienced  by  melancholy  patients,  and  of 
which  you  may  recall  my  relating  some  examples.^  This 
sense  of  clean  and  beautiful  newness  within  and  without 
is  one  of  the  commonest  entries  in  conversion  records.  Jon- 
athan Edwards  thus  describes  it  in  himself: — 

"After  this  my  sense  of  divine  things  gradually  increased,  and 
became  more  and  more  lively,  and  had  more  of  that  inward 
sweetness.  The  appearance  of  everything  was  altered;  there 
seemed  to  be,  as  it  were,  a  calm,  sweet  cast,  or  appearance  of  di- 
vine glory,  in  almost  everything.  God's  excellency,  his  wisdom, 
his  purity  and  love,  seemed  to  appear  in  everything;  in  the  sun, 
moon,  and  stars;  in  the  clouds  and  blue  sky;  in  the  grass,  flow- 
ers, and  trees;  in  the  water  and  all  nature;  which  used  greatly  tc 
fix  my  mind.  And  scarce  anything,  among  all  the  works  of  na- 
ture, was  so  sweet  to  me  as  thunder  and  lightning;  formerly 
nothing  had  been  so  terrible  to  me.  Before,  I  used  to  be  uncom- 
monly terrified  with  thunder,  and  to  be  struck  with  terror  when 
I  saw  a  thunderstorm  rising;  but  now,  on  the  contrary,  it  re- 
joices me."  " 

^  Above,  p.  150. 
■   ^Dwight:  Life  of  Edwards,  New  York,  1830,  p.  61,  abridged. 


'44       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Billy  Bray,  an  excellent  little  illiterate  English  evangelist, 
records  his  sense  of  newness  thus: — 

"I  said  to  the  Lord:  'Thou  hast  said,  they  that  ask  shall  re- 
ceive, they  that  seek  shall  find,  and  to  them  that  knock  the  door 
shall  be  opened,  and  I  have  faith  to  believe  it.'  In  an  instant  the 
Lord  made  me  so  happy  that  I  cannot  express  what  I  felt.  I 
shouted  for  joy.  I  praised  God  with  my  whole  heart.  ...  I 
think  this  was  in  November,  1823,  but  what  day  of  the  month 
[  do  not  know.  I  remember  this,  that  everything  looked  new  to 
me,  the  people,  the  fields,  the  cattle,  the  trees.  I  was  like  a  new 
man  in  a  new  world.  I  spent  the  greater  part  of  my  time  in 
praising  the  Lord."  ^ 

Starbuck  and  Leuba  both  illustrate  this  sense  of  newness 
by  quotations.  I  take  the  two  following  from  Starbuck's 
manuscript  collection.  One,  a  woman,  says:— 

"I  was  taken  to  a  camp-meeting,  mother  and  religious  friends 
seeking  and  praying  for  my  conversion.  My  emotional  nature 
was  stirred  to  its  depths;  confessions  of  depravity  and  pleading 
with  God  for  salvation  from  sin  made  me  oblivious  of  all  sur- 
roundings. I  plead  for  mercy,  and  had  a  vivid  realization  of  for- 
giveness and  renewal  of  my  nature.  When  rising  from  my  knees 
I  exclaimed,  'Old  things  have  passed  away,  all  things  have  be- 
come new.'  It  was  like  entering  another  world,  a  new  state  of 
existence.  Natural  objects  were  glorified,  my  spiritual  vision  was 
so  clarified  that  I  saw  beauty  in  every  material  object  in  the  uni- 
verse, the  woods  were  vocal  with  heavenly  music;  my  soul  ex- 
ulted in  the  love  of  God,  and  I  wanted  everybody  to  share  in 
my  joy." 

The  next  case  is  that  of  a  man: — 

"I  know  not  how  I  got  back  into  the  encampment,  but  found 
myself  staggering  up  to  Rev. 's  Holiness  tent— and  as  it  was 

1  W.  F.  Bourne:  The  King's  Son,  a  Memoir  of  Billy  Bray,  London, 
Hamilton,  Adams  &  Co.,  1887,  p.  9. 


CONVERSION  245 

full  of  seekers  and  a  terrible  noise  inside,  some  groaning,  some 
laughing,  and  some  shouting,  and  by  a  large  oak,  ten  feet  from 
the  tent,  I  fell  on  my  face  by  a  bench,  and  tried  to  pray,  and 
CTery  time  I  would  call  on  God,  something  like  a  man's  hand 
would  strangle  me  by  choking.  I  don't  know  whether  there  wer^ 
any  one  around  or  near  me  or  not.  I  thought  I  should  surely  die 
if  I  did  not  get  help,  but  just  as  often  as  I  would  pray,  that  un- 
seen hand  was  felt  on  my  throat  and  my  breath  squeezed  off. 
Finally  something  said:  'Venture  on  the  atonement,  for  you  will 
die  anyway  if  you  don't.'  So  I  made  one  final  struggle  to  call  on 
God  for  mercy,  with  the  same  choking  and  strangling,  deter- 
mined to  finish  the  sentence  of  prayer  for  Mercy,  if  I  did 
strangle  and  die,  and  the  last  I  remember  that  time  was  falling 
back  on  the  ground  with  the  same  unseen  hand  on  my  throat.  I 
don't  know  how  long  I  lay  there  or  what  was  going  on.  None 
of  my  folks  were  present.  When  I  came  to  myself,  there  were  a 
crowd  around  me  praising  God.  The  very  heavens  seemed  to 
open  and  pour  down  rays  of  light  and  glory.  Not  for  a  moment 
only,  but  all  day  and  night,  floods  of  light  and  glory  seemed  to 
pour  through  my  soul,  and  oh,  how  I  was  changed,  and  every 
thing  became  new.  My  horses  and  hogs  and  even  everybody 
seemed  changed." 

This  man's  case  introduces  the  feature  of  automatisms, 
which  in  suggestible  subjects  have  been  so  startling  a  fea- 
mre  at  revivals  since,  in  Edwards's,  Wesley's  and  Whitfield's 
time,  these  became  a  regular  means  of  gospel-propagation. 
They  were  at  first  supposed  to  be  semi-miraculous  proofs 
of  "power"  on  the  part  of  the  Holy  Ghost;  but  great  diver- 
gence of  opinion  quickly  arose  concerning  them.  Edwards, 
in  his  Thoughts  on  the  Revival  of  Religion  in  New  England, 
has  to  defend  them  against  their  critics;  and  their  value  has 
long  been  matter  of  debate  even  within  the  revivalistic  de- 
nominations.^ They  undoubtedly  have  no  essential  spiritual 

^Consult  William  B.  Sprague:  Lectures  on  Revivals  of  Religion, 
New  York,  1832,  in  the  long  Appendix  to  which  the  opinions  of  a 
large  number  of  ministers  are  given. 


246       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

significance,  and  although  their  presence  makes  his  con- 
version more  memorable  to  the  convert,  it  has  never  been 
proved  that  converts  who  show  them  are  more  persevering 
or  fertile  in  good  fruits  than  those  whose  change  of  heart 
has  had  less  violent  accompaniments.  On  the  whole,  uncon- 
sciousness, convulsions,  visions,  involuntary  vocal  utter- 
ances, and  suffocation,  must  be  simply  ascribed  to  the  sub- 
ject's having  a  large  subliminal  region,  involving  nervous  in- 
stability. This  is  often  the  subject's  own  view  of  the  matter 
afterwards.  One  of  Starbuck's  correspondents  writes,  for  in- 
stance : — 

"I  have  been  through  the  experience  which  is  known  as  con- 
version. My  explanation  of  it  is  this:  the  subject  works  his  emo- 
tions up  to  the  breaking  point,  at  the  same  time  resisting  their 
physical  manifestations,  such  as  quickened  pulse,  etc.,  and  then 
suddenly  lets  them  have  their  full  sway  over  his  body.  The  re- 
lief is  something  wonderful  and  the  pleasurable  effects  of  the 
emotions  are  experienced  to  the  highest  degree." 

There  is  one  form  of  sensory  automatism  which  possibly 
deserves  special  notice  on  account  of  its  frequency.  I  refer 
to  hallucinatory  or  pseudo-hallucinatory  luminous  phenom- 
ena, photistns,  to  use  the  term  of  the  psychologists.  Saint 
Paul's  blinding  heavenly  vision  seems  to  have  been  a  phe- 
nomenon of  this  sort;  so  does  Constantine's  cross  in  the  sky. 
The  last  case  but  one  which  I  quoted  mentions  floods  of 
light  and  glory.  Henry  Alline  mentions  a  light,  about  whose 
externahty  he  seems  uncertain.  Colonel  Gardiner  sees  a 
blazing  light.  President  Finney  writes: — 

"All  at  once  the  glory  of  God  shone  upon  and  round  about 
me  in  a  manner  almost  marvelous.  ...  A  light  perfectly  inef- 
fable shone  in  my  soul,  that  almost  prostrated  me  on  the  ground. 
,  .  .  This  light  seemed  like  the  brightness  of  the  sun  in  every 
direction.  It  was  too  intense  for  the  eyes.  ...  I  think  I  knew 
something  then,  by  actual  experience,  of  that  light  that  pros- 


CONVERSION  247 

trated  Paul  on  the  way  to  Damascus.  It  was  surely  a  light  such 
as  I  could  not  have  endured  long."  ^ 

Such  reports  of  photisms  are  indeed  far  from  uncommon. 
Here  is  another  from  Starbuck's  collection,  where  the  light 
appeared  evidently  external: — 

"I  had  attended  a  series  of  revival  services  for  about  two 
weeks  o£f  and  on.  Had  been  invited  to  the  altar  several  times, 
all  the  time  becoming  more  deeply  impressed,  when  finally  I 
decided  I  must  do  this,  or  I  should  be  lost.  Realization  of  con- 
version was  very  vivid,  like  a  ton's  weight  being  lifted  from  my 
heart;  a  strange  light  which  seemed  to  light  up  the  whole  room 
(for  it  was  dark);  a  conscious  supreme  bliss  which  caused  me 
to  repeat  'Glory  to  God'  for  a  long  time.  Decided  to  be  God's 
child  for  life,  and  to  give  up  my  pet  ambition,  wealth  and  social 
position.  My  former  habits  of  life  hindered  my  growth  some- 
what, but  I  set  about  overcoming  these  systematically,  and  in 
one  year  my  whole  nature  was  changed,  i.  e.,  my  ambitions 
were  of  a  different  order." 

Here  is  another  one  of  Starbuck's  cases,  involving  a  lu 
minous  element: — 

"I  had  been  clearly  converted  twenty-three  years  before,  01 
rather  reclaimed.  My  experience  in  regeneration  was  then  clear 
and  spiritual,  and  I  had  not  backslidden.  But  I  experienced  en~ 
tire  sanctification  on  the  15th  day  of  March,  1893,  about  eleven 
o'clock  in  the  morning.  The  particular  accompaniments  of  the 
experience  were  entirely  unexpected.  I  was  quietly  sitting  ar 
home  singing  selections  out  of  Pentecostal  Hymns.  Suddenly 
there  seemed  to  be  a  something  sweeping  into  me  and  inflating 
my  entire  being — such  a  sensation  as  I  had  never  experienced 
before.  When  this  experience  came,  I  seemed  to  be  conducted 
around  a  large,  capacious,  well-lighted  room.  As  I  walked  with 
my  invisible  conductor  and  looked  around,  a  clear  thought  was 
coined  in  my  mind,  'They  are  not  here,  they  are  gone.'  As  soon 

^  Memoirs,    p.    34. 


248       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

IS  the  thought  was  definitely  formed  in  my  mind,  though  no 
word  was  spoken,  the  Holy  Spirit  impressed  me  that  I  was  sur- 
veying my  own  soul.  Then,  for  the  first  time  in  all  my  life,  did 
I  know  that  I  was  cleansed  from  all  sin,  and  filled  with  the  full- 
ness of  God." 

Leuba  quotes  the  case  of  a  Mr.  Peek,  where  the  luminous 
affection  reminds  one  of  the  chromatic  hallucinations  pro- 
duced by  the  intoxicant  cactus  buds  called  mescal  by  the 
Mexicans : — 

"When  I  went  in  the  morning  into  the  fields  to  work,  the 
glory  of  God  appeared  in  all  his  visible  creation.  I  well  remem- 
ber we  reaped  oats,  and  how  every  straw  and  head  of  the  oats 
seemed,  as  it  were,  arrayed  in  a  kind  of  rainbow  glory,  or  to 
glow,  if  I  may  so  express  it,  in  the  glory  of  God."  ^ 

^  These  reports  of  sensorial  photism  shade  off  into  what  are  evi- 
dently only  metaphorical  accounts  of  the  sense  of  new  spiritual  il- 
lumination, as,  for  instance,  in  Brainerd's  statement:  "As  I  was  walk- 
ing in  a  thick  grove,  unspeakable  glory  seemed  to  open  to  the  ap- 
prehension of  my  soul.  I  do  not  mean  any  external  brightness,  for  I 
saw  no  such  thing,  nor  any  imagination  of  a  body  of  light  in  the 
third  heavens,  or  anything  of  that  nature,  but  it  wr.:  a  new  inward 
apprehension  or  view  that  I  had  of  God." 

In  a  case  like  this  next  one  from  Starbuck's  manuscript  collecdon, 
the  lighting  up  of  the  darkness  is  probably  also  metaphorical: — 

"One  Sunday  night,  I  resolved  that  when  I  got  home  to  the  ranch 
where  I  was  working,  I  would  offer  myself  with  my  faculties  and  all 
to  God  to  be  used  only  by  and  for  him.  ...  It  was  raining  and  the 
roads  were  muddy;  but  this  desire  grew  so  strong  that  I  kneeled 
down  by  the  side  of  the  road  and  told  God  all  about  it,  intending 
then  to  get  up  and  go  on.  Such  a  thing  as  any  special  answer  to  my 
prayer  never  entered  my  mind,  having  been  converted  by  faith,  but 
still  being  most  undoubtedly  saved.  Well,  while  I  was  praying,  I 
remember  holding  out  my  hands  to  God  and  telling  him  they  should 
work  for  him,  my  feet  walk  for  him,  my  tongue  speak  for  him,  etc., 
etc..  if  he  would  only  use  me  as  his  instrument  and  give  me  a  sadsfy- 
ing  experience — when  suddenly  the  darkness  of  the  night  seemed  lit 
up — I  felt,  realized,  knew,  that  God  heard  and  answered  my  prayer. 


CONVERSION  249 

The  most  characteristic  of  all  the  elements  of  the  conver- 
sion crisis,  and  the  last  one  of  which  I  shall  speak,  is  the  ec' 
stasy  of  happiness  produced.  We  have  already  heard  several 
accounts  of  it,  but  I  will  add  a  couple  more.  President  Fin- 
ney's is  so  vivid  that  I  give  it  at  length: — 

"All  my  feelings  seemed  to  rise  and  flow  out;  and  the  utter- 
ance of  my  heart  was,  'I  want  to  pour  my  whole  soul  out  to 
God.'  The  rising  of  my  soul  was  so  great  that  I  rushed  into  the 
back  room  of  the  front  office,  to  pray.  There  was  no  fire  and  no 
light  in  the  room;  nevertheless  it  appeared  to  me  as  if  it  were 
perfectly  light.  As  I  went  in  and  shut  the  door  after  me,  it 
seemed  as  if  I  met  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  face  to  face.  It  did  not 
occur  to  me  then,  nor  did  it  for  some  time  afterwards,  that  it 
was  wholly  a  mental  state.  On  the  contrary,  it  seemed  to  me 
that  I  saw  him  as  I  would  see  any  other  man.  He  said  nothing, 
but  looked  at  me  in  such  a  manner  as  to  break  me  right  down 
at  his  feet.  I  have  always  since  regarded  this  as  a  most  remark- 
able state  of  mind;  for  it  seemed  to  me  a  reality  that  he  stood 

Deep  happiness  came  over  me;  I  felt  I  was  accepted  into  the  inner 
circle  of  God's  loved  ones." 

In  the  following  case  also  the  flash  of  light  is  metaphorical: — 
"A  prayer  meeting  had  been  called  for  at  close  of  evening  service 
The  minister  supposed  mc  impressed  by  his  discourse  (a  mistake — he 
was  dull).  He  came  and,  placing  his  hand  upon  my  shoulder,  said: 
'Do  you  not  want  to  give  your  heart  to  God?'  I  replied  in  the  affirma- 
tive. Then  said  he,  'Come  to  the  front  seat.'  They  sang  and  prayed 
and  talked  with  me.  I  experienced  nothing  but  unaccountable  wretch- 
edness. They  declared  that  the  reason  why  I  did  not  'obtain  peace'  was 
because  I  was  not  willing  to  give  up  all  to  God.  After  about  two 
hours  the  minister  said  we  would  go  home.  As  usual,  on  redring,  I 
prayed.  In  great  distress,  I  at  this  time  simply  said,  'Lord,  I  have  done 
all  I  can,  I  leave  the  whole  matter  with  thee.'  Immediately,  like  a 
flash  of  light,  there  came  to  me  a  great  peace,  and  I  arose  and  went 
into  my  parents'  bedroom  and  said,  'I  do  feel  so  wonderfully  happy.' 
This  I  regard  as  the  hour  of  conversion.  It  was  the  hour  in  which  1 
became  assured  of  divine  acceptance  and  favor.  So  far  as  my  life  was 
concerned,  it  made  little  immediate  cliange." 


250       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

before  me,  and  I  fell  down  at  his  feet  and  poured  out  my  soul 
to  him.  I  wept  aloud  like  a  child,  and  made  such  confessions  as 
I  could  with  my  choked  utterance.  It  seemed  to  me  that  I  bathed 
his  feet  with  my  tears;  and  yet  I  had  no  distinct  impressioi.  that 
T  touched  him,  that  I  recollect.  I  must  have  continued  in  this 
state  for  a  good  while;  but  my  mind  was  too  absorbed  with  the 
interview  to  recollect  anything  that  I  said.  But  I  know,  as  soon 
as  my  mind  became  calm  enough  to  break  ofT  from  the  inter- 
view, I  returned  to  the  front  office,  and  found  that  the  fire  that 
I  had  made  of  large  wood  was  nearly  burned  out.  But  as  I 
turned  and  was  about  to  take  a  seat  by  the  fire,  I  received  a 
mighty  baptism  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  Without  any  expectation 
of  it,  without  ever  having  the  thought  in  my  mind  that  there 
was  any  such  thing  for  me,  without  any  recollection  that  I  had. 
ever  heard  the  thing  mentioned  by  any  person  in  the  world,  the 
Holy  Spirit  descended  upon  me  in  a  manner  that  seemed  to  go 
through  me,  body  and  soul.  I  could  feel  the  impression,  like  a 
wave  of  electricity,  going  through  and  through  me.  Indeed,  it 
seemed  to  come  in  waves  and  waves  of  liquid  love;  for  I  could 
not  express  it  in  any  other  way.  It  seemed  like  the  very  breath 
of  God.  I  can  recollect  distinctly  that  it  seemed  to  fan  me,  like 
immense  wings. 

"No  words  can  express  the  wonderful  love  that  was  shed 
abroad  in  my  heart.  I  wept  aloud  with  joy  and  love;  and  I  do 
not  know  but  I  should  say  I  literally  bellowed  out  the  unutter- 
able gushings  of  my  heart.  These  waves  came  over  me,  and  over 
me,  and  over  me,  one  after  the  other,  until  I  recollect  I  cried 
out,  'I  shall  die  if  these  waves  continue  to  pass  over  me.'  I  said, 
'Lord,  I  cannot  bear  any  more;'  yet  I  had  no  fear  of  death. 

"How  long  I  continued  in  this  state,  with  this  baptism  con- 
tinuing to  roll  over  me  and  go  through  me,  I  do  not  know.  But 
I  know  it  was  late  in  the  evening  when  a  member  of  my  choir 
— for  I  was  the  leader  of  the  choir — came  into  the  office  to  see 
nie.  He  was  a  member  of  the  church.  He  found  me  in  this  state 
-jf  loud  weeping,  and  said  to  me,  'Mr.  Finney,  what  ails  you.^^'  I 
could  make  him  no  answer  for  some  time.  He  then  said,  'Are 
you  In  pain?'  I  gathered  myself  up  as  best  I  could,  and  replied, 
'No,  but  so  happy  that  I  cannot  live.'  " 


CONVERSION  251 

I  just  now  quoted  Billy  Bray;  I  cannot  do  better  than 
give  his  own  brief  account  of  his  post-conversion  feehngs : — 

"I  can't  help  praising  the  Lord.  As  I  go  along  the  street,  I  lift 
up  one  foot,  and  it  seems  to  say  'Glory';  and  I  lift  up  the  other, 
and  it  seems  to  say  'Amen';  and  so  they  keep  up  like  that  all 
the  time  I  am  walking."  ^ 

One  word,  before  I  close  this  lecture,  on  the  question  of 
the  transiency  or  permanence  of  these  abrupt  conversions. 
Some  of  you,  I  feel  sure,  knowing  that  numerous  backslid- 
ings  and  relapses  take  place,  make  of  these  their  apperceiv- 
ing  mass  for  interpreting  the  whole  subject,  and  dismiss  it 

^  I  add  in  a  note  a  few  more  records: — 

"One  morning,  being  in  deep  distress,  fearing  every  moment  I 
should  drop  into  hell,  1  was  constrained  to  cry  in  earnest  for  mercy, 
and  the  Lord  came  to  my  relief,  and  delivered  my  soul  from  the  bur- 
den and  guilt  of  sin.  My  whole  frame  was  in  a  tremor  from  head  to 
foot,  and  my  soul  enjoyed  sweet  peace.  The  pleasure  I  then  felt  was 
indescribable.  The  happiness  lasted  about  three  days,  during  which 
time  I  never  spoke  to  any  person  about  my  feelings."  Autobiography 
of  Dan  Young,  edited  by  W.  P.  Strickland,  New  York,  i860. 

"In  an  instant  there  rose  up  in  me  such  a  sense  of  God's  taking 
care  of  those  who  put  their  trust  in  him  that  for  an  hour  all  the 
world  was  crystalline,  the  heavens  were  lucid,  and  I  sprang  to  my 
feet  and  began  to  cry  and  laugh."  H.  W.  Beecher,  quoted  by  Leuba. 

"My  tears  of  sorrow  changed  to  joy,  and  I  lay  there  praising  God 
in  such  ecstasy  of  joy  as  only  the  soul  who  experiences  it  can  realize." 
— "I  cannot  express  how  I  felt.  It  was  as  if  I  had  been  in  a  dark  dun- 
geon and  lifted  into  the  light  of  the  sun.  I  shouted  and  I  sang  praise 
unto  him  who  loved  me  and  washed  me  from  my  sins.  I  was  forced 
to  retire  into  a  secret  place,  for  the  tears  did  flow,  and  I  did  not  wish 
my  shopmates  to  see  me,  and  yet  I  could  not  keep  it  a  secret." — "I 
experienced  joy  almost  to  weeping." — "I  felt  my  face  must  have  shone 
like  that  of  Moses.  I  had  a  general  feeling  of  buoyancy.  It  was  the 
greatest  joy  it  was  ever  my  lot  to  experience." — "I  wept  and  laughed 
alternately.  I  was  as  light  as  if  walking  on  air.  I  felt  as  if  I  had  gained 
greater  peace  and  happiness  than  I  had  ever  expected  to  experience.' 
Starbuck's    correspondents. 


252      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

with  a  pitying  smile  at  so  much  "hysterics."  Psychologically, 
as  well  as  religiously,  however,  this  is  shallow.  It  misses  the 
point  of  serious  interest,  which  is  not  so  much  the  duration 
as  the  nature  and  quality  of  these  shiftings  of  character  to 
higher  levels.  Men  lapse  from  every  level — we  need  no  sta- 
tistics to  tell  us  that.  Love  is,  for  instance,  well  known  not 
to  be  irrevocable,  yet,  constant  or  inconstant,  it  reveals  new 
flights  and  reaches  of  ideality  while  it  lasts.  These  revelations 
form  its  significance  to  men  and  women,  whatever  be  its 
duration.  So  with  the  conversion  experience:  that  it  should 
for  even  a  short  time  show  a  human  being  what  the  high- 
water  mark  of  his  spiritual  capacity  is,  this  is  what  consti- 
tutes its  importance — an  importance  which  backsliding  can- 
not diminish,  although  persistence  might  increase  it.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  all  the  more  striking  instances  of  conversion, 
all  those,  for  instance,  which  I  have  quoted,  have  been  per- 
manent. The  case  of  which  there  might  be  most  doubt,  on 
account  of  its  suggesting  so  strongly  an  epileptoid  seizure, 
was  the  case  of  M.  Ratisbonne.  Yet  I  am  informed  that  Rat- 
isbonne's  whole  future  was  shaped  by  those  few  minutes. 
He  gave  up  his  project  of  marriage,  became  a  priest,  founded 
at  Jerusalem,  where  he  went  to  dwell,  a  mission  of  nuns 
for  the  conversion  of  the  Jews,  showed  no  tendency  to  use 
for  egotistic  purposes  the  notoriety  given  him  by  the  peculiar 
circumstances  of  his  conversion — which,  for  the  rest,  he 
could  seldom  refer  to  without  tears — and  in  short  remained 
an  exemplary  son  of  the  Church  until  he  died,  late  in  the 
So's,  if  I  remember  rightly. 

The  only  statistics  I  know  of,  on  the  subject  of  the  dura- 
tion of  conversions,  arc  those  collected  for  Professor  Star- 
buck  by  Miss  Johnston.  They  embrace  only  a  hundred  per- 
sons, evangelical  church-members,  more  than  half  being 
Methodists.  According  to  the  statement  of  the  subjects  them- 
selves, there  had  been  backsliding  of  some  sort  in  nearly  all 
the  cases,  93  per  cent,  of  the  women,  77  per  cent,  of  the  men. 


CONVERSION  253 

Discussing  the  returns  more  minutely,  Starbuck  finds  that 
only  6  per  cent,  are  relapses  from  the  religious  faith  which 
the  conversion  confirmed,  and  that  the  backsliding  com- 
plained of  is  in  most  only  a  fluctuation  in  the  ardor  of  sen- 
timent.  Only  six  of  the  hundred  cases  report  a  change  of 
faith.  Starbuck's  conclusion  is  that  the  effect  of  conversion 
is  to  bring  with  it  "a  changed  attitude  towards  life,  which 
is  fairly  constant  and  permanent,  although  the  feelings  fluc- 
tuate. ...  In  other  words,  the  persons  who  have  passed 
through  conversion,  having  once  taken  a  stand  for  the  reli- 
gious life,  tend  to  feel  themselves  identified  with  it,  no  mat- 
ter how  much  their  religious  enthusiasm  declines."  ^ 

^  Psychology  of  Religion,  pp.  360,  357. 


Lectures  XI,  XII,  and  XIII 
SAINTLINESS 

THE  last  lecture  left  us  in  a  state  of  expectancy.  What 
may  the  practical  fruits  for  life  have  been,  of  such 
movingly  happy  conversions  as  those  we  heard  of?  With 
this  question  the  really  important  part  of  our  task  opens,  for 
you  remember  that  we  began  all  this  empirical  inquiry  not 
merely  to  open  a  curious  chapter  in  the  natural  history  of 
human  consciousness,  but  rather  to  attain  a  spiritual  judg- 
ment as  to  the  total  value  and  positive  meaning  of  all  the 
religious  trouble  and  happiness  which  we  have  seen.  We 
must,  therefore,  first  describe  the  fruits  of  the  religious  life, 
and  then  we  must  judge  them.  This  divides  our  inquiry  into 
two  distinct  parts.  Let  us  without  further  preamble  proceed 
to  the  descriptive  task. 

It  ought  to  be  the  pleasantest  portion  of  our  business  in 
these  lectures.  Some  small  pieces  of  it,  it  is  true,  may  be  pain- 
ful, or  may  show  human  nature  in  a  pathetic  light,  but  it 
will  be  mainly  pleasant,  because  the  best  fruits  of  religious 
experience  are  the  best  things  that  history  has  to  show.  They 
have  always  been  esteemed  so;  here  if  anywhere  is  the  gen- 
uinely strenuous  life;  and  to  call  to  mind  a  succession  of 
such  examples  as  I  have  lately  had  to  wander  through, 
though  it  has  been  only  in  the  reading  of  them,  is  to  feel  en- 
couraged and  uplifted  and  washed  in  better  moral  air. 

The  highest  flights  of  charity,  devotion,  trust,  patience, 
bravery  to  which  the  wings  of  human  nature  have  spread 
themselves  have  been  flown  for  religious  ideals.  I  can  do  no 
better  than  quote,  as  to  this,  some  remarks  which  Sainte- 

254 


SAINTLINESS  255 

Beuve  in  his  History  of  Port-Royal  makes  on  the  results  of 
conversion  or  the  state  of  grace. 

"Even  from  the  purely  human  point  of  view,"  Sainte- 
Beuve  says,  "the  phenomenon  of  grace  must  still  appear  sut 
ficiently  extraordinary,  eminent,  and  rare,  both  in  its  nature 
and  in  its  effects,  to  deserve  a  closer  study.  For  the  soul  ar- 
rives thereby  at  a  certain  fixed  and  invincible  state,  a  state 
which  is  genuinely  heroic,  and  from  out  of  which  the  great- 
est deeds  which  it  ever  performs  are  executed.  Through  all 
the  different  forms  of  communion,  and  all  the  diversity  of 
the  means  which  help  to  produce  this  state,  whether  it  be 
reached  by  a  jubilee,  by  a  general  confession,  by  a  solitary 
prayer  and  effusion,  whatever  in  short  to  be  the  place  and 
the  occasion,  it  is  easy  to  recognize  that  it  is  fundamentally 
one  state  in  spirit  and  fruits.  Penetrate  a  little  beneath  the 
diversity  of  circumstances,  and  it  becomes  evident  that  in 
Christians  of  different  epochs  it  is  always  one  and  the  same 
modification  by  which  they  are  affected:  there  is  veritably 
a  single  fundamental  and  identical  spirit  of  piety  and  char- 
ity, common  to  those  who  have  received  grace;  an  inner 
state  which  before  all  things  is  one  of  love  and  humility,  of 
infinite  confidence  in  God,  and  of  severity  for  one's  self,  ac- 
companied with  tenderness  for  others.  The  fruits  peculiar  to 
this  condition  of  the  soul  have  the  same  savor  in  all,  under 
distant  suns  and  in  different  surroundings,  in  Saint  Teresa 
of  Avila  just  as  in  any  Moravian  brother  of  Herrnhut."  ^ 

Sainte-Beuve  has  here  only  the  more  eminent  instances 
of  regeneration  in  mind,  and  these  are  of  course  the  instruc- 
tive ones  for  us  also  to  consider.  These  devotees  have  often 
laid  their  course  so  differently  from  other  men  that,  judging 
them  by  worldly  law,  we  might  be  tempted  to  call  them 
monstrous  aberrations  from  the  path  of  nature.  I  begin, 
therefore,  by  asking  a  general  psychological  question  as  to 

'Sainte-Beuve:   Port-Royal,  vol.  i.  pp.  95  and   106,  abridged. 


256       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

what  the  inner  conditions  are  which  may  make  one. human 
character  diflFer  so  extremely  from  another. 

I  reply  at  once  that  where  the  character,  as  something  dis- 
tinguished from  the  intellect,  is  concerned,  the  causes  of  hu- 
man diversity  lie  chieily  in  our  differing  susceptibilities  of 
emotional  excitement,  and  in  the  different  impulses  and  in- 
hibitions which  these  bring  in  their  train.  Let  me  make  this 
more  clear. 

Speaking  generally,  our  moral  and  practical  attitude,  at 
any  given  time,  is  always  a  resultant  of  two  sets  of  forces 
within  us,  impulses  pushing  us  one  way  and  obstructions 
and  inhibitions  holding  us  back.  "Yes!  yes!"  say  the  im- 
pulses; "No!  no!"  say  the  inhibitions.  Few  people  who  have 
not  expressly  reflected  on  the  matter  realize  how  constantly 
this  factor  of  inhibition  is  upon  us,  how  it  contains  and 
moulds  us  by  its  restrictive  pressure  almost  as  if  we  were 
fluids  pent  within  the  cavity  of  a  jar.  The  influence  is  so  in- 
cessant that  it  becomes  subconscious.  All  of  you,  for  ex- 
ample, sit  here  with  a  certain  constraint  at  this  moment,  and 
(Entirely  without  express  consciousness  of  the  fact,  because 
of  the  influence  of  the  occasion.  If  left  alone  in  the  room, 
each  of  you  would  probably  involuntarily  rearrange  him- 
self, and  make  his  attitude  more  "free  and  easy."  But  propri- 
eties and  their  inhibitions  snap  like  cobwebs  if  any  great 
emotional  excitement  supervenes.  I  have  seen  a  dandy  ap- 
pear in  the  street  with  his  face  covered  with  shaving-lather 
because  a  house  across  the  way  was  on  fire;  and  a  woman 
will  run  among  strangero  in  her  nightgown  if  it  be  a  ques- 
tion of  saving  her  baby's  life  or  her  own.  Take  a  self-indul- 
gent woman's  life  in  general.  She  will  yield  to  every  inhibi- 
tion set  by  her  disagreeable  sensations,  lie  late  in  bed,  live 
upon  tea  or  bromides,  keep  indoors  from  the  cold.  Every 
difficulty  finds  her  obedient  to  its  "no."  But  make  a  mother 
of  her,  and  what  have  you?  Possessed  by  maternal  excite- 
ment, she  now  confronts  wakefulness,  weariness,  and  toil 


SAINTLINESS  257 

without  an  instant  of  hesitation  or  a  word  of  complaint. 
The  inhibitive  power  of  pain  over  her  is  extinguished  where- 
ever  the  baby's  interests  are  at  stake.  The  inconveniences 
which  this  creature  occasions  have  become,  as  James  Hin- 
ton  says,  the  glowing  heart  of  a  great  joy,  and  indeed  are 
now  the  very  conditions  whereby  the  joy  becomes  most- 
deep. 

This  is  an  example  of  what  you  have  already  heard  of  as 
the  "expulsive  power  of  a  higher  affection."  But  be  the  af- 
fection  high  or  low,  it  makes  no  difference,  so  long  as  tht 
excitement  it  brings  be  strong  enough.  In  one  of  Henry 
Drummond's  discourses  he  tells  of  an  inundation  in  India 
where  an  eminence  with  a  bungalow  upon  it  remained  un- 
submerged,  and  became  the  refuge  of  a  number  of  wild  ani- 
mals and  reptiles  in  addition  to  the  human  beings  who  were 
there.  At  a  certain  moment  a  royal  Bengal  tiger  appeared 
swimming  towards  it,  reached  it,  and  lay  panting  like  a  dog 
upon  the  ground  in  the  midst  of  the  people,  still  possessed 
by  such  an  agony  of  terror  that  one  of  the  Englishmen  could 
calmly  step  up  with  a  rifle  and  blow  out  its  brains.  The  ti- 
ger's habitual  ferocity  was  temporarily  quelled  by  the  ema 
tion  of  fear,  which  became  sovereign,  and  formed  a  new 
centre  for  his  character. 

Sometimes  no  emotional  state  is  sovereign,  but  many  con- 
trary ones  are  mixed  together.  In  that  case  one  hears  both 
"yeses"  and  "noes,"  and  the  "will"  is  called  on  then  to  solve 
the  conflict.  Take  a  soldier,  for  example,  with  his  dread  of 
cowardice  impelling  him  to  advance,  his  fears  impelling  him 
to  run,  and  his  propensities  to  imitation  pushing  him  to- 
wards various  courses  if  his  comrades  offer  various  examples. 
His  person  becomes  the  seat  of  a  mass  of  interferences;  and 
he  may  for  a  timt  simply  waver,  because  no  one  emotion 
prevails.  There  is  a  pitch  of  intensity,  though,  which,  if  any 
emotion  reach  it,  enthrones  that  one  as  alone  effective  and 
sweeps  its  antagonists  and  all  their  inhibitions  away.  The 


258       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

fury  of  his  comrades'  charge,  once  entered  on,  will  give  this 
pitch  of  courage  to  the  soldier;  the  panic  of  their  rout  will 
give  this  pitch  of  fear.  In  these  sovereign  excitements,  things 
ordinarily  impossible  grow  natural  because  the  inhibitions 
are  annulled.  Their  "no!  no!"  not  only  is  not  heard,  it  does 
not  exist.  Obstacles  are  then  like  tissue-paper  hoops  to  the 
circus  rider — no  impediment;  the  flood  is  higher  than  the 
dam  they  make.  "Lass  sie  betteln  gehn  wenn  sie  hungrig 
sind!"  cries  the  grenadier,  frantic  over  his  Emperor's  cap- 
ture, when  his  wife  and  babes  are  suggested ;  and  men  pent 
into  a  burning  theatre  have  been  known  to  cut  their  way 
through  the  crowd  with  knives.^ 

One  mode  of  emotional  excitability  is  exceedingly  impor- 
tant in  the  composition  of  the  energetic  character,  from  its 
peculiarly  destructive  power  over  inhibitions.  I  mean  what 
in  its  lower  form  is  mere  irascibility,  susceptibility  to  wrath, 
tlie  fighting  temper;  and  what  in  subtler  ways  manifests  it- 
self as  impatience,  grimness,  earnestness,  severity  of  char- 
acter. Earnestness  means  willingness  to  live  with  energy, 
though  energy  bring  pain.  The  pain  may  be  pain  to  other 

^  "  'Love  would  not  be  love,'  says  Bourget,  'unless  it  could  carry 
one  to  crime.'  And  so  one  may  say  that  no  passion  would  be  a  veri- 
table passion  unless  it  could  carry  one  to  crime."  (Sighele:  Psychol- 
logie  des  Sectes,  p.  136.)  In  other  words,  great  passions  annul  the  or- 
dinary inhibitions  set  by  "conscience."  And  conversely,  of  all  the 
criminal  human  beings,  the  false,  cowardly,  sensual,  or  crue!  persons 
who  actually  live,  there  is  perhaps  not  one  whose  criminal  impulse 
may  not  be  at  some  moment  overpowered  by  the  presence  of  some 
other  emotion  to  which  his  character  is  also  potentially  liable,  pro- 
vided that  odier  emotion  be  only  made  intense  enough.  Fear  is  usual- 
ly the  most  available  emotion  for  this  result  in  this  particular  class  of 
persons.  It  stands  for  conscience,  and  may  here  be  classed  appro- 
priately as  a  "higher  affection."  If  we  are  soon  to  die,  or  if  we  believe 
a  day  of  judgment  to  be  near  at  hand,  how  qJickly  do  we  put  our 
moral  house  in  order — we  do  not  see  how  sin  can  evermore  exert 
temptation  over  us!  Old-fashioned  hell-fire  Christianity  well  knew 
how  to  extract  from  fear  its  full  equivalent  in  the  way  of  fruits  for 
•■i^pentance,  and  its  full  conversion  value. 


SAINTLINESS  259 

people  or  pain  to  one's  self — it  makes  little  difference;  £01 
when  the  strenuous  mood  is  on  one,  the  aim  is  to  break 
something,  no  matter  whose  or  what.  Nothing  annihilates 
an  inhibition  as  irresistibly  as  anger  does  it;  for,  as  Mokke 
says  of  war,  destruction  pure  and  simple  is  its  essence.  This 
is  what  makes  it  so  invaluable  an  ally  of  every  other  passion. 
The  sweetest  delights  are  trampled  on  with  a  ferocious 
pleasure  the  moment  they  offer  themselves  as  checks  to  a 
cause  by  which  our  higher  indignations  are  elicited.  It  costs 
then  nothing  to  drop  friendships,  to  renounce  long-rooted 
privileges  and  possessions,  to  break  with  social  ties.  Rather 
do  we  take  a  stern  joy  in  the  astringency  and  desolation;  and 
what  is  called  weakness  of  character  seems  in  most  cases  to 
consist  in  the  inaptitude  for  these  sacrificial  moods,  of  which 
one's  own  inferior  self  and  its  pet  softnesses  must  often  be 
the  targets  and  the  victims.^ 

So  far  I  have  spoken  of  temporary  alterations  produced  by 
shifting  excitements  in  the  same  person.  But  the  relatively 
fixed  differences  of  character  of  different  persons  are  ex- 
plained in  a  precisely  similar  way.  In  a  man  with  a  liability 
to  a  special  sort  of  emotion,  whole  ranges  of  inhibition  ha- 
bitually  vanish,  which  in  other  men  remain  effective,  and 
other  sorts  of  inhibition  take  their  place.  When  a  person  has 
an  inborn  genius  for  certain  emotions,  his  life  differs 
strangely  from  that  of  ordinary  people,  for  none  of  their 
usual  deterrents  check  him.  Your  mere  aspirant  to  a  type 
of  character,  on  the  contrary,  only  shows,  when  your  natural 
lover,  fighter,  or  reformer,  with  whom  the  passion  is  a  gift 

^Example:  Benjamin  Constant  was  often  marveled  at  as  an  extra 
ordinary  instance  of  superior  intelligence  with  inferior  character.  He 
writes  (Journal,  Paris,  1895,  P-  5^)>  "^  ^^n  tossed  and  dragged  about 
by  my  miserable  weakness.  Never  was  anything  so  ridiculous  as  my 
indecision.  Now  marriage,  now  solitude;  now  Germany,  now  France, 
hesitation  upon  hesitation,  and  all  because  at  bottom  I  am  unable  to 
giue  up  anything."  He  can't  "get  mad"  at  any  of  his  alternatives;  and 
the  career  of  a  man  beset  by  such  an  all-round  amiability  is  hopeless. 


26o       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

of  nature,  comes  along,  the  hopeless  inferiority  of  voluntary 
to  instinctive  action.  He  has  deliberately  to  overcome  his  in- 
hibitions; the  genius  with  the  inborn  passion  seems  not  to 
feel  them  at  all;  he  is  free  of  all  that  inner  friction  and  ner- 
vous waste.  To  a  Fox,  a  Garibaldi,  a  General  Booth,  a  John 
Brown,  a  Louise  Michel,  a  Bradlaugh,  the  obstacles  omnip- 
otent over  those  around  them  are  as  if  non-existent.  Should 
the  rest  of  us  so  disregard  them,  there  might  be  many  such 
heroes,  for  many  have  the  wish  to  live  for  similar  ideals,  and 
only  the  adequate  degree  of  inhibition-quenching  fury  is 
lacking.^ 

The  difference  between  willing  and  merely  wishing,  be- 
tween having  ideals  that  are  creative  and  ideals  that  are  but 

^  The  great  thing  which  the  higher  excitpbiUties  give  is  courage; 
And  the  addition  or  subtraction  of  a  certain  amount  of  this  quality 
makes  a  different  man,  a  diiterent  Hfe.  Various  excitements  let  the 
courage  loose.  Trustful  hope  will  do  it;  inspiring  example  will  do  it; 
!ove  will  do  it;  wrath  will  do  it.  In  some  people  it  is  natively  so  high 
that  the  mere  touch  of  danger  does  it,  though  danger  is  for  most  men 
the  great  inhibitor  of  acdon.  "Love  of  adventure"  becomes  in  such 
persons  a  ruling  passion.  "I  believe,"  says  General  Skobeleff,  "that  my 
bra\ery  is  simply  the  passion  and  at  the  same  dme  the  contempt  of 
danger.  The  risk  of  life  fills  me  with  an  exaggerated  rapture.  The 
'fewer  there  arc  to  share  it,  the  more  I  like  it.  The  pardcipadon  of  my 
body  in  the  event  is  required  to  furnish  me  an  adequate  excitement. 
'Everything  intellectual  appears  to  me  to  be  reflex;  but  a  meedng  of 
inan  to  man,  a  duel,  a  danger  into  which  I  can  throw  myself  head- 
foremost, attracts  me,  moves  me,  intoxicates  me.  I  am  crazy  for  it,  I 
'ove  it,  I  adore  it.  I  run  after  danger  as  one  runs  after  women;  I  wish 
't  never  to  stop.  Were  it  always  the  same,  it  would  always  bring  me 
a  new  pleasure.  When  I  throw  myself  into  an  ad\enture  in  which  I 
hope  to  find  it,  my  heart  palpita  "s  with  the  uncertainty;  I  could  wish 
.'it  once  to  have  it  appear  and  )et  to  delay.  A  sort  of  painful  and 
delicious  shiver  shakes  me;  my  entire  nature  runs  to  meet  the  peril 
with  an  impetus  that  my  will  would  in  vain  try  to  resist."  (}uliette 
Adam:  Le  General  Skobeleff,  Nouvelle  Revue,  1886,  abridged.)  Sko- 
beleff  seems  to  have  been  a  cruel  egoist;  but  the  disinterested  Gari- 
baldi, if  one  may  judge  by  his  "Memorie,"  lived  in  an  unflagging 
emodon  of  similar  danger-seeking  excitement. 


SAINTLINESS  26I 

pinings  and  regrets,  thus  depends  solely  either  on  the 
amount  of  steam-pressure  chronically  driving  the  character 
in  the  ideal  direction,  or  on  the  amount  of  ideal  excitement 
transiently  acquired.  Given  a  certain  amount  of  love,  indig- 
nation, generosity,  magnanimity,  admiration,  loyalty,  or  en- 
thusiasm of  self-surrender,  the  result  is  always  the  same. 
That  whole  raft  of  cowardly  obstructions,  which  in  tame 
persons  and  dull  moods  are  sovereign  impediments  to  ac- 
tion, sinks  away  at  once.  Our  conventionality,^  our  shyness, 
laziness,  and  stinginess,  our  demands  for  precedent  and  per- 
mission,  for  guarantee  and  surety,  our  small  suspicions,  tim- 
idities, despairs,  where  are  they  now ?  Severed  like  cobwebs, 
broken  like  bubbles  in  the  sun — 

"Wo  sind  die  Sorge  nun  und  Noth 
Die  mich  noch  gestern  woUt'  erschlaffen? 
Ich  scham'  mich  dess'  im  Morgenroth." 

The  flood  we  are  borne  on  rolls  them  so  lighdy  under  that 
their  very  contact  is  unfelt.  Set  free  of  them,  we  float  and 
soar  and  sing.  This  auroral  openness  and  uplift  gives  to  ah 
creative  ideal  levels  a  bright  and  caroling  quality,  which  h 
nowhere  more  marked  than  where  the  controlling  emotion 
is  religious.  "The  true  monk,"  writes  an  ItaHan  mystic, 
"takes  nothing  with  him  but  his  lyre." 

We  may  now  turn  from  these  psychological  generalities 
to  those  fruits  of  the  religious  state  which  form  the  special 
subject  of  our  present  lecture.  The  man  who  lives  in  his  re- 
ligious centre  of  personal  energy,  and  is  actuated  by  spiritual 
enthusiasms,  differs  from  his  previous  carnal  self  in  perfect- 
ly definite  ways.  The  new  ardor  which  burns  in  his  breast 

^  See  the  case  on  p.  69,  above,  where  the  writer  describes  his  ex- 
periences of  communion  with  the  Divine  as  consisting  "merely  in 
the  temporary  obliteration  of  the  conventionalities  which  usually 
cover  my  life." 


262      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

consumes  in  its  glow  the  lower  "noes"  which  formerly  beset 
him,  and  keeps  him  immune  against  infection  from  the  en- 
tire groveling  portion  of  his  nature.  Magnanimities  once 
impossible  are  now  easy;  paltry  conventionalities  and  mean 
incentives  once  tyrannical  hold  no  sway.  The  stone  wall  in- 
side of  him  has  fallen,  the  hardness  in  his  heart  has  broken 
down.  The  rest  of  us  can,  I  think,  imagine  this  by  recalling 
our  state  of  feeling  in  those  temporary  "melting  moods"  into 
which  either  the  trials  of  real  life,  or  the  theatre,  or  a  novel 
sometimes  throws  us.  Especially  if  we  weep!  For  it  is  then 
as  if  our  tears  broke  through  an  inveterate  inner  dam,  and 
let  all  sorts  of  ancient  peccancies  and  moral  stagnancies 
drain  away,  leaving  us  now  washed  and  soft  of  heart  and 
open  to  every  nobler  leading.  With  most  of  us  the  customary 
hardness  quickly  returns,  but  not  so  with  saintly  persons. 
Many  saints,  even  as  energetic  ones  as  Teresa  and  Loyola, 
have  possessed  what  the  church  traditionally  reveres  as  a 
special  grace,  the  so-called  gift  of  tears.  In  these  persons  the 
melting  mood  seems  to  have  held  almost  uninterrupted  con- 
trol. And  as  it  is  with  tears  and  melting  moods,  so  it  is  with 
other  exalted  affections.  Their  reign  may  come  by  gradual 
growth  or  by  a  crisis;  but  in  either  case  it  may  have  "come 
to  stay." 

At  the  end  of  the  last  lecture  we  saw  this  permanence  to 
be  true  of  the  general  paramountcy  of  the  higher  insight, 
even  though  in  the  ebbs  of  emotional  excitement  meaner 
motives  might  temporarily  prevail  and  backsliding  might 
occur.  But  that  lower  temptations  may  remain  completely 
annulled,  apart  from  transient  emotion  and  as  if  by  altera- 
tion of  the  man's  habitual  nature,  is  also  proved  by  docu- 
mentary evidence  in  certain  cases.  Before  embarking  on  the 
general  natural  history  of  the  regenerate  character,  let  me 
convince  you  of  this  curious  fact  by  one  or  two  examples. 
The  most  numerous  are  those  of  reformed  drunkards.  You 
recollect  the  case  of  Mr.  Hadley  in  the  last  lecture;  the  Jerry 


SAINTLINESS  263 

McAulcy  Water  Street  Mission  abounds  in  similar  in- 
stances.^ You  also  remember  the  graduate  of  Oxford,  con- 
verted at  three  in  the  afternoon,  and  getting  drunk  in  the 
hay-field  the  next  day,  but  after  that  permanently  cured  of 
his  appetite.  "From  that  hour  drink  has  had  no  terrors  for 
me:  I  never  touch  it,  never  want  it.  The  same  thing  oc- 
curred with  my  pipe.  .  .  .  the  desire  for  it  went  at  once  and 
has  never  returned.  So  with  every  known  sin,  the  deliver^ 
ance  in  each  case  being  permanent  and  complete.  I  have  had 
no  temptations  since  conversion." 

Here  is  an  analogous  case  from  Starbuck's  manuscript 
collection : — 

"I  went  into  the  old  Adclphi  Theatre,  where  there  was  a 
Holiness  meeting,  .  .  .  and  I  began  saying,  'Lord,  Lord,  I 
must  have  this  blessing.'  Then  what  was  to  me  an  audible  voice 
said:  'Are  you  willing  to  give  up  everything  to  the  Lord?*  and 
question  after  question  kept  coming  up,  to  all  of  which  I  said: 
'Yes,  Lord;  yes.  Lord!'  until  this  came:  'Why  do  you  not  accept 
it  now?'  and  I  said:  'I  do.  Lord.' — I  felt  no  particular  joy,  only 
a  trust.  Just  then  the  meeting  closed,  and,  as  I  went  out  on  the 
street,  I  met  a  gentleman  smoking  a  fine  cigar,  and  a  cloud  of 
•  smoke  came  into  my  face,  and  I  took  a  long,  deep  breath  of  it, 
and  praise  the  Lord,  all  my  appetite  for  it  was  gone.  Then  as  I 
walked  along  the  street,  passing  saloons  where  the  fumes  of 
liquor  came  out,  I  found  that  all  my  taste  and  longing  for  that 
accursed  stuff  was  gone.  Glory  to  God!  .  .  .  IBut]  for  ten  or 
eleven  long  years  [after  that]  I  was  in  the  wilderness  with  its 
ups  and  downs.  My  appetite  for  liquor  never  came  back." 

The  classic  case  of  Colonel  Gardiner  is  that  of  a  man 
cured  of  sexual  temptation  in  a  single  hour.  To  Mr.  Spears 
the  colonel  said,  "I  was  effectually  cured  of  all  inclination 
to  that  sin  I  was  so  strongly  addicted  to  that  I  thought  noth- 

^  Above,  p.  200.  "The  only  radical  remedy  I  know  for  dipsomania 
is  religiomania,"  is  a  saying  I  have  heard  quoted  from  some  medicai 
man. 


264       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ing  but  shooting  me  through  the  head  could  have  cured  me 
of  it;  and  all  desire  and  inclination  to  it  was  removed,  as 
entirely  as  if  I  had  been  a  sucking  child;  nor  did  the  temp- 
tation return  to  this  day."  Mr.  Webster's  words  on  the  same 
subject  are  these:  "One  thing  I  have  heard  the  colonel  fre- 
quently say,  that  he  was  much  addicted  to  impurity  before 
his  acquaintance  with  religion;  but  that,  so  soon  as  he  was 
enlightened  from  above,  he  felt  the  power  of  the  Holy 
Ghost  changing  his  nature  so  wonderfully  that  his  sanctifi- 
cation  in  this  respect  seemed  more  remarkable  than  in  any 
other."  ^ 

Such  rapid  abolition  of  ancient  impulses  and  propensities 
reminds  us  so  strongly  of  what  has  been  observed  as  the  re- 
sult of  hypnotic  suggestion  that  it  is  difficult  not  to  believe 
that  subliminal  influences  play  the  decisive  part  in  these 
abrupt  changes  of  heart,  just  as  they  do  in  hypnotism.^  Sug- 
gestive therapeutics  abound  in  records  of  cure,  after  a  few 
sittings,  of  inveterate  bad  habits  with  which  the  patient-,  left 
to  ordinary  moral  and  physical  influences,  had  struggled  in 

^  Doddridge's  Life  of  Colonel  James  Gardiner,  London  Religious 
Tract    Society,    pp.    23-32. 

^  Here,  for  example,  is  a  case,  from  Starbuck's  book,  in  which  a 
'sensory  automatism"  brought  about  quickly  what  prayers  and  re- 
r.olves  had  been  unable  to  effect.  The  subject  is  a  woman.  She 
writes: — 

"When  I  was  about  forty  I  tried  to  quit  smoking,  but  the  desire 
was  on  me,  and  had  me  in  its  power.  I  cried  and  prayed  and  promised 
God  to  quit,  but  could  not.  I  had  smoked  for  fifteen  years.  When  I 
was  fifty-three,  as  I  sat  by  the  fire  one  day  smoking,  a  voice  came  to 
me.  I  did  not  hear  it  with  my  ears,  but  more  as  a  dream  or  sort  of 
double  think.  It  said,  'Louisa,  lay  down  smoking.'  At  once  I  replied, 
'Will  you  take  the  desire  away?'  But  it  only  kept  saying:  'Louisa,  lay 
down  smoking.'  Then  I  got  up,  laid  my  pipe  on  the  mantel-shelf, 
and  never  smoked  again  or  had  any  desire  to.  The  desire  was  gone 
as  though  I  had  never  known  it  or  touched  tobacco.  The  sight  of 
otliers  smoking  and  the  smell  of  smoke  never  gave  me  the  least  wish 
to  touch  it  again."  The  Psychology  of  Religion,  p.  142. 


SAINTLINESS  265 

vain.  Both  drunkenness  and  sexual  vice  have  been  cured  in 
this  way,  action  through  the  subhminal  seeming  tlius  in 
many  individuals  to  have  the  prerogative  of  inducing  rela- 
tively stable  change.  If  the  grace  of  God  miraculously  oper- 
ates, it  probably  operates  through  the  subliminal  door,  then. 
But  just  how  anything  operates  in  this  region  is  still  unex- 
plained, and  we  shall  do  well  now  to  say  good-by  to  the 
process  of  transformation  altogether — leaving  it,  if  you  like, 
a  good  deal  of  a  psychological  or  theological  mystery — and 
to  turn  our  attention  to  the  fruits  of  the  religious  condition, 
no  matter  in  what  way  they  may  have  been  produced.-^ 

^  Professor  Starbuck  expresses  the  radical  destruction  of  old  in- 
fluences physiologically,  as  a  cutting  off  of  the  connection  between 
higher  and  lower  cerebral  centres.  "This  condition,"  he  says,  "in 
which  the  association-centres  connected  with  the  spiritual  life  are 
cut  off  from  the  lower,  is  often  reflected  in  the  way  corresponden:s 
describe  their  experiences.  .  .  .  For  example:  'Temptations  from 
without  still  assail  me,  but  there  is  nothing  within  to  respond  to 
them.'  The  ego  [here]  is  wholly  identified  with  the  higher  centres, 
whose  quality  of  feeling  is  that  of  withinness.  Another  of  the  ro- 
spondents  says:  'Since  then,  although  Satan  tempts  me,  there  is  as  (t 
were  a  wall  of  brass  around  me,  so  that  his  darts  cannot  touch  me.'  " 
— Unquestionably,  functional  exclusions  of  this  sort  must  occur  in 
the  cerebral  organ.  But  on  the  side  accessible  to  introspection,  their 
causal  condition  is  nothing  but  the  degree  of  spirimal  excitement, 
getting  at  last  so  high  and  strong  as  to  be  sovereign;  and  it  must  be 
frankly  confessed  that  we  do  not  know  just  why  or  how  such  so^•- 
ereignty  comes  about  in  one  person  and  not  in  another.  We  can  only 
give  our  imagination  a  certain  delusive  help  by  mechanical  analogie:;. 

If  we  should  conceive,  for  example,  that  the  human  mind,  with  its 
different  possibilities  of  equilibrium,  might  be  like  a  many-sided  sohd 
with  different  surfaces  on  which  it  could  lie  flat,  we  might  liken 
mental  revolutions  to  the  spatial  revolutions  of  such  a  body.  As  it  is 
pried  up,  say  by  a  lever,  from  a  position  in  which  it  lies  on  surface 
A,  for  instance,  it  will  linger  for  a  time  unstably  halfway  up,  and  if 
the  lever  cease  to  urge  it,  it  will  tumble  back  or  "relapse"  under  the 
continued  pull  of  gravity.  But  if  at  last  it  rotate  far  enough  for  its 
centre  of  gravity  to  pass  beyond  surface  A  altogether,  the  body  wiiM 
fall  over,  on  surface  B,  say,  and  abide  there  permanently.  The  pull' 


^66       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

The  collective  name  for  the  ripe  fruits  of  religion  in  a 
character  is  Saintliness.^  The  saintly  character  is  the  char- 
acter for  which  spiritual  emotions  are  the  habitual  centre 
of  the  personal  energy;  and  there  is  a  certain  composite 
photograph  of  universal  saintliness,  the  same  in  all  religions, 
of  which  the  features  can  easily  be  traced." 

They  are  these: — 

I.  A  feeling  of  being  in  a  wider  life  than  that  of  this 
world's  selfish  little  interests;  and  a  conviction,  not  merely 
intellectual,  but  as  it  were  sensible,  of  the  existence  of  an 
Ideal  Power.  In  Christian  saintliness  this  power  is  always 

of  gravity  towards  A  have  vanished,  and  may  now  be  disregarded. 
The  polyhedron  has  become  immune  against  farther  attracdon  from 
their  direction. 

In  this  figure  of  speech  the  Ie\er  may  correspond  to  the  emotional 
influences  making  for  a  new  life,  and  the  inidal  pull  of  gravity  to 
the  ancient  drawbacks  and  inhibirions.  So  long  as  the  emodonal  in- 
fluence fails  to  reach  a  certain  pitch  of  efficacy,  the  changes  it  pro- 
duces are  unstable,  and  the  man  relapses  into  his  original  atdtude. 
But  when  a  certain  intensity  is  attained  by  the  new  emodon,  a  crid- 
cal  point  is  passed,  and  there  then  ensues  an  irreversible  revoludon, 
equivalent  to  the  producdon  of  a  new  nature. 

^  I  use  this  word  in  spite  of  a  certain  flavor  of  "sancdmoniousness" 
which  somedmes  clings  to  it,  because  no  other  word  suggests  as  well 
the  exact  combination  of  affections  which  the  text  goes  on  to  describe. 

2  "It  will  be  found,"  says  Dr.  W.  R.  Inge  (in  his  lectures  on  Chris- 
dan  Mysdcism,  London,  1899,  p.  326),  "that  men  of  preeminent 
saindiness  agree  very  closely  in  what  they  tell  us.  They  tell  us  thai 
they  have  arrived  at  an  unshakable  convicdon,  not  based  on  inference 
but  on  immediate  experience,  that  God  is  a  spirit  with  whom  the 
human  spirit  can  hold  intercourse;  that  in  him  meet  all  that  they 
can  imagine  of  goodness,  truth,  and  beauty;  that  they  can  see  his 
footprints  everywhere  in  nature,  and  feel  his  presence  within  them 
as  the  very  life  of  their  life,  so  diat  in  propordon  as  they  come  to 
themselves  they  come  to  him.  They  tell  us  what  separates  us  from 
him  and  from  happiness  is,  first,  self-seeking  in  all  its  forms;  and, 
secondly,  sensuality  in  all  its  forms;  that  these  are  the  ways  of  dark- 
ness and  death,  which  hide  from  us  the  face  of  God;  while  the  path 
of  the  iust  is  like  a  shining  light,  which  shineth  more  and  more  unto 
the  perfect  day." 


SAINTLINESS     •  267 

personified  as  God;  but  abstract  moral  ideals,  civic  or  patri' 
otic  Utopias,  or  inner  versions  of  holiness  or  right  may  also 
be  felt  as  the  true  lords  and  enlargers  of  our  life,  in  ways 
vi^hich  I  described  in  the  lecture  on  the  Reality  of  the  Un- 
seen.^ 

2.  A  sense  of  the  friendly  continuity  of  the  ideal  power 
with  our  own  life,  and  a  willing  self-surrender  to  its  con- 
trol. 

3.  An  immense  elation  and  freedom,  as  the  outlines  of  the 
confinino-  selfhood  melt  down. 

4.  A  shifting  of  the  emotional  centre  towards  loving  and 
harmonious  affections,  towards  "yes,  yes,"  and  away  from 
"no,"  where  the  claims  of  the  non-ego  are  concerned. 

^  The  "enthusiasm  of  humanity"  may  lead  to  a  hfe  which  coalesces 
in  many  respects  with  that  of  Christian  saintliness.  Take  the  follow- 
ing rules  proposed  to  members  of  the  Union  pour  I'Action  morale, 
in  the  Bulletin  de  I'Union,  April  1-15,  1894.  See,  also,  Revue  Bleue, 
August  13,  1892. 

"We  would  make  known  in  our  own  persons  the  usefulness  of 
rule,  of  discipline,  of  resignation  and  renunciation;  we  would  teach 
the  necessary  perpetuity  of  suffering,  and  explain  the  creative  part 
which  it  plays.  We  would  wage  war  upon  false  optimism;  on  the 
base  hope  of  happiness  coming  to  us  ready  made;  on  the  notion  of  a 
salvation  by  knowledge  alone,  or  by  material  civilization  alone,  vain 
symbol  as  this  is  of  civilization,  precarious  external  arrangement, 
ill-fitted  to  replace  the  intimate  union  and  consent  of  souls.  We  would 
wage  war  also  on  bad  morals,  whether  in  public  or  in  private  life;  on 
luxury,  fastidiousness,  and  over-refinement;  on  all  diat  tends  to  in- 
crease the  painful,  immoral,  and  and-social  muldphcadons  of  our 
wants;  on  all  that  excites  envy  and  dislike  in  the  soul  of  the  common 
people,  and  confirms  the  notion  that  the  chief  end  of  life  is  freedom 
to  enjoy.  We  would  preach  by  our  example  the  respect  of  superiors 
and  equals,  the  respect  of  all  men;  affectionate  simplicity  in  our 
relations  with  inferiors  and  insignificant  persons;  indulgence  where 
our  own  claims  only  are  concerned,  but  firmness  in  our  demands 
where  they  relate  to  dudes  towards  others  or  towards  the  public. 

"For  the  common  people  are  what  we  help  them  to  become;  their 
vices  are  our  vices,  gazed  upon,  envied,  and  imitated;  and  if  they 
come  back  with  all  their  weight  upon  us,  it  is  but  just. 


l68     the  varieties  of  religious  experience 

These  fundamental  inner  conditions  have  characteristic 
practical  consequences,  as  follows: — 

a.  Asceticism. — The  self-surrender  may  become  so  pas- 
sionate as  to  turn  into  self-immolation.  It  may  then  so  over- 
rule the  ordinary  inhibitions  of  the  flesh  that  the  saint  finds 
positive  pleasure  in  sacrifice  and  asceticism,  measuring  and 
expressing  as  they  do  the  degree  of  his  loyalty  to  the  higher 
power. 

b.  Strength  of  Soul. — The  sense  of  enlargement  of  life 
may  be  so  uplifting  that  personal  motives  and  inhibitions, 
commonly  omnipotent,  become  too  insignificant  for  notice, 
and  new  reaches  of  patience  and  fortitude  open  out.  Fears 
and  anxieties  go,  and  blissful  equanimity  takes  their  place. 
Come  heaven,  come  hell,  it  makes  no  diiTerence  now! 

"We  forbid  ourselves  all  seeking  after  popularity,  all  ambi- 
tion to  appear  important.  We  pledge  ourselves  to  abstain  from 
klsehood,  in  all  its  degrees.  We  promise  not  to  create  or  en- 
courage illusions  as  to  what  is  possible,  by  what  we  say  or  write. 
We  promise  to  one  another  active  sincerity,  which  strives  to  see 
truth  clearly,  and  which  never  fears  to  declare  what  it  sees. 

"We  promise  deliberate  resistance  to  the  tidal  waves  of 
fashion,  to  the  'booms'  and  panics  of  the  public  raind,  to  all  the 
forms  of  weakness  and  of  fear. 

"We  forbid  ourselves  the  use  of  sarcasm.  Of  serious  things 
we  will  speak  seriously  and  unsmilingly,  without  banter  and 
without  the  appearance  of  banter; — and  even  so  of  all  things, 
for  there  are  serious  ways  of  being  light  of  heart. 

"We  will  put  ourselves  forward  always  for  what  we  are, 
simply  and  without  false  humility,  as  well  as  without  pedantry, 
affectation,  or  pride." 

c.  Purity. — The  shifting  of  the  emotional  centre  brings 
with  it,  first,  increase  of  purity.  The  sensitiveness  to  spiritual 
discords  is  enhanced,  and  the  cleansing  of  existence  from 
brutal  and  sensual  elements  becomes  imperative.  Occasions 
of  contact  with  such  elements  are  avoided:  the  saintly  life 


SAINTLINESS  269 

must  deepen  its  spiritual  consistency  and  keep  unspotted 
from  the  world.  In  some  temperaments  this  need  of  purity 
of  spirit  takes  an  ascetic  turn,  and  weaknesses  of  the  flesh  are 
treated  with  relentless  severity. 

d.  Charity— i:\it  shifting  of  the  emotional  centre  brings, 
secondly,  increase  of  charity,  tenderness  for  fellow-creatures. 
The  ordinary  motives  to  antipathy,  which  usually  set  such 
close  bounds  to  tenderness  among  human  beings,  are  in- 
hibited. The  saint  loves  his  enemies,  and  treats  loathsome 
beggars  as  his  brothers. 

I  now  have  to  give  some  concrete  illustrations  of  thest 
fruits  of  the  spiritual  tree.  The  only  difficulty  is  to  choose, 
for  they  are  so  abundant. 

Since  the  sense  of  Presence  of  a  higher  and  friendly  pow- 
er seems  to  be  the  fundamental  feature  in  the  spiritual  life^ 
i  will  begin  with  that. 

In  our  narratives  of  conversion  we  saw  how  the  world 
might  look  shining  and  transfigured  to  the  convert,^  and, 
apart  from  anything  acutely  religious,  we  all  have  moments 
when  the  universal  life  seems  to  wrap  us  round  with  friend- 
liness. In  youth  and  health,  in  summer,  in  the  woods  or  on 
the  mountains,  there  come  days  when  the  weather  seems 
all  whispering  with  peace,  hours  when  the  goodness  and 
beauty  of  existence  enfold  us  like  a  dry  warm  climate,  or 
chime  through  us  as  if  our  inner  ears  were  subtly  ringing 
with  the  world's  security.  Thoreau  writes: — 

"Once,  a  few  weeks  after  I  came  to  the  woods,  for  an  hour  I 
doubted  whether  the  near  neighborhood  of  man  was  not  essen- 
tial to  a  serene  and  healthy  life.  To  be  alone  was  somewhat  un- 
pleasant. But,  in  the  midst  of  a  gentle  rain,  while  these  thoughti 
prevailed,  I  was  suddenly  sensible  of  such  sweet  and  beneficent 
society  in  Nature,  in  the  very  pattering  of  the  drops,  and  in 

^  Above,  pp.  243  &.. 


270       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

every  sight  and  sound  around  my  house,  an  infinite  and  unac- 
countable friendliness  all  at  once,  like  an  atmosphere,  sustaining 
me,  as  made  the  fancied  advantages  of  human  neighborhood 
insignificant,  and  I  have  never  thought  of  them  since.  Every 
little  pine-needle  expanded  and  swelled  with  sympathy  and  be- 
friended me.  I  was  so  distirictly  made  aware  of  the  presence  of 
something  kindred  to  me,  that  I  thought  no  place  could  ever  be 
strange  to  me  again."  ^ 

In  the  Christian  consciousness  this  sense  of  the  enveloping 
friendliness  becomes  most  personal  and  definite.  "The  com- 
pensation," writes  a  German  author,  "for  the  loss  of  that 
sense  of  personal  independence  which  man  so  unwillingly, 
gives  up,  is  the  disappearance  of  all  fear  from  one's  life,  the 
quite  indescribable  and  inexplicable  feeling  of  an  inner  se- 
curity, which  one  can  only  experience,  but  which,  once 
it  has  been  experienced,  one  can  never  forget."  " 

1  find  an  excellent  description  of  this  state  of  mind  in  a 
sermon  by  Mr.  Voysey: — 

"It  is  the  experience  of  myriads  of  trustful  souls,  that  this 
sense  of  God's  unfailing  presence  with  them  in  their  going  out 
and  in  their  coming  in,  and  by  night  and  day,  is  a  source  of  ab- 
solute repose  and  confident  calmness.  It  drives  away  all  fear  of 
what  may  befall  them.  That  nearness  of  God  is  a  constant  se- 
curity against  terror  and  anxiety.  It  is  not  that  they  are  at  all  as- 
sured of  physical  safety,  or  deem  themselves  protected  by  a  love 
which  is  denied  to  others,  but  that  they  are  in  a  state  of  mind 
equally  ready  to  be  safe  or  to  meet  with  injury.  If  injury  befall 
them,  they  will  be  content  to  bear  it  because  the  Lord  is  their 
keeper,  and  nothing  can  befall  them  without  his  will.  If  it  be 
his  will,  then  injury  is  for  them  a  blessing  and  no  calamity  at 
all.  Thus  and  thus  only  is  the  trustful  man  protected  and  shield- 
ed from  harm.  And  I  for  one — by  no  means  a  thick-skinned  or 

^  H.  Thoreau:  Walden,  Riverside  edition,  p.  206,  abridged. 

2  C.  H.  Hilty:  Gliick,  vol.  i.  p.  85. 


SAINTLINESS  ITJl 

hard-nerved  man — am  absolutely  satisfied  with  this  arrange- 
ment, and  do  not  wish  for  any  other  kind  of  immunity  from 
danger  and  catastrophe.  Quite  as  sensitive  to  pain  as  the  most 
highly  strung  organism,  I  yet  feel  that  the  worst  of  it  is  con- 
quered, and  the  sting  taken  out  of  it  altogether,  by  the  thought 
that  God  is  our  loving  and  sleepless  keeper,  and  that  nothing 
can  hurt  us  without  his  will."  ^ 

More  excited  expressions  of  this  condition  are  abundant  in 
religious  literature.  I  could  easily  weary  you  with  their  mo- 
notony. Here  is  an  account  from  Mrs.  Jonathan  Edwards:— 

"Last  night,"  Mrs.  Edwards  writes,  "was  the  sweetest  nighi 
I  ever  had  in  my  life.  I  never  before,  for  so  long  a  time  together, 
enjoyed  so  much  of  the  light  and  rest  and  sweetness  of  heaven 
in  my  soul,  but  without  the  least  agitation  of  body  during  the 
whole  time.  Part  of  the  night  I  lay  awake,  sometimes  asleep, 
and  sometimes  bet\^een  sleeping  and  waking.  But  all  night  I 
continued  in  a  constant,  clear,  and  lively  sense  of  the  heavenly 
sweetness  of  Christ's  excellent  love,  of  his  nearness  to  me,  and 
of  my  dearness  to  him;  with  an  inexpressibly  sweet  calmness  of 
soul  in  an  entire  rest  in  him.  I  seemed  to  myself  to  perceive  a 
glow  of  divine  love  come  down  from  the  heart  of  Christ  in 
heaven  into  my  heart  in  a  constant  stream,  like  a  stream  or  pen- 
cil of  sweet  light.  At  the  same  time  my  heart  and  soul  all  flowed 
out  in  love  to  Christ,  so  that  there  seemed  to  be  a  constant  flow- 
ing and  reflowing  of  heavenly  love,  and  I  appeared  to  myself 
to  float  or  swim,  in  these  bright,  sweet  beams,  like  the  motes 
swimming  in  the  beams  of  the  sun,  or  the  streams  of  his  light 
which  come  in  at  the  window.  I  think  that  what  I  felt  each 
minute  was  worth  more  than  all  the  outward  comfort  and 
pleasure  which  I  had  enjoyed  in  my  whole  life  put  together.  It 
was  pleasure,  without  the  least  sting,  or  any  interruption.  It  was 
a  sweetness,  which  my  soul  was  lost  in;  it  seemed  to  be  all  that 
my  feeble  frame  could  sustain.  There  was  but  little  difference, 
whether  I  was  asleep  or  awake,  but  if  there  was  any  difference, 

^  The  Mystery  of  Pain  and  Death,  London,  1892,  p.  258. 


272       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

che  sweetness  was  greatest  while  I  was  asleep.^  As  I  awoke  early 
the  next  morning,  it  seemed  to  me  that  I  had  entirely  done  with 
myself.  I  felt  that  the  opinions  of  the  world  concerning  me  were 
nothing,  and  that  I  had  no  more  to  do  with  any  outward  inter- 
est of  my  own  than  with  that  of  a  person  whom  I  never  saw. 
The  glory  of  God  seemed  to  swallow  up  every  wish  and  desire 
of  my  heart.  .  .  .  After  retiring  to  rest  and  sleeping  a  little 
while,  I  awoke,  and  was  led  to  reflect  on  God's  mercy  to  me,  in 
giving  me,  for  many  years,  a  willingness  to  die;  and  after  that, 
in  making  me  willing  to  live,  that  I  might  do  and  suffer  what- 
ever he  called  me  to  here.  I  also  thought  how  God  had  gra- 
ciously given  me  an  entire  resignation  to  his  will,  with  respect 
to  the  kind  and  manner  of  death  that  I  should  die;  having  been 
made  willing  to  die  on  the  rack,  or  at  the  stake,  and  if  h  were 
God's  will,  to  die  in  darkness.  But  now  it  occurred  to  me,  I  used 
to  think  of  living  no  longer  than  to  the  ordinary  age  of  man. 
Upon  this  I  was  led  to  ask  myself,  whether  I  was  not  willing  to 
be  kept  out  of  heaven  even  longer;  and  my  whole  heart  seemed 
immediately  to  reply:  Yes,  a  thousand  years,  and  a  thousand  in 
horror,  if  it  be  most  for  the  honor  of  God,  the  torment  of  my 
body  being  so  great,  awful,  and  overwhelming  that  none  could 
bear  to  live  in  the  country  where  the  spectacle  was  seen,  and  the 
torment  of  my  mind  being  vastly  greater.  And  it  seemed  to  me 
that  I  found  a  perfect  willingness,  quietness,  and  alacrity  of 
soul  in  consenting  that  it  should  be  so,  if  it  were  most  for  the 
glory  of  God,  so  that  there  was  no  hesitation,  doubt,  or  darkness 
in  my  mind.  The  glory  of  God  seemed  to  overcome  me  and 

^Compare  Madame  Guyon:  "It  was  my  practice  to  arise  at  mid- 
night for  purposes  of  devotion.  ...  It  seemed  to  me  that  God 
came  at  the  precise  time  and  woke  me  from  sleep  in  order  that  I 
might  enjoy  him.  When  I  was  out  of  health  or  greatly  fatigued,  he 
did  not  awake  me,  but  at  such  times  I  felt,  even  in  my  sleep,  a  singu- 
lar possession  of  God.  He  loved  me  so  much  that  he  seemed  to  per- 
vade my  being,  at  a  time  when  I  could  be  only  imperfecdy  conscious 
of  his  presence.  My  sleep  is  sometimes  broken — a  sort  of  half  sleep; 
but  my  soul  seems  to  be  awake  enough  to  know  God,  when  it  is 
hardly  capable  of  knowing  anything  else."  T.  C.  Upham:  The  Life 
and  Religious  Experiences  of  Madame  de  la  Mothe  Guyon,  New 
York,  1877,  vol  i.  p.  260. 


SAINTLINESS  273 

swallow  me  up,  and  every  conceivable  suffering,  and  everything 
that  was  terrible  to  my  nature,  seemed  to  shrink  to  nothing  be- 
fore it.  This  resignation  continued  in  its  clearness  and  bright- 
ness the  rest  of  the  night,  and  all  the  next  day,  and  the  night 
following,  and  on  Monday  in  the  forenoon,  without  interrup- 
tion or  abatement."  ^ 

The  annals  of  Catholic  saintship  abound  in  records  as 
ecstatic  or  more  ecstatic  than  this.  "Often  the  assaults  of  the 
divine  love,"  it  is  said  of  the  Sister  Seraphique  de  la  Martin- 
iere,  "reduced  her  almost  to  the  point  of  death.  She  used 
tenderly  to  complain  of  this  to  God.  'I  cannot  support  it,' 
she  used  to  say.  'Bear  gently  with  my  weakness,  or  I  shall 
expire  under  the  violence  of  your  love.'  "  " 

Let  me  pass  next  to  the  Charity  and  Brotherly  Love  which 
are  a  usual  fruit  of  saintliness,  and  have  always  been  reck- 
oned essential  theological  virtues,  however  limited  may  have 
been  the  kinds  of  service  which  the  particular  theology  en- 
joined. Brotherly  love  would  follow  logically  from  the  as- 
surance of  God's  friendly  presence,  the  notion  of  our  broth 
erhood  as  men  being  an  immediate  inference  from  that  ol 
God's  fatherhood  of  us  all.  When  Christ  utters  the  pre- 
cepts: "Love  your  enemies,  bless  them  that  curse  you,  do 
good  to  them  that  hate  you,  and  pray  for  them  which  des- 
pitefully  use  you,  and  persecute  you,"  he  gives  for  a  reason: 
"That  ye  may  be  the  children  of  your  Father  which  is  in 
heaven:  for  he  maketh  his  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  on  the 
good,  and  sendeth  rain  on  the  just  and  on  the  unjust."  One 
might  therefore  be  tempted  to  explain  both  the  humility  as 
to  one's  self  and  the  charity  towards  others  which  charac- 
terize spiritual  excitement,  as  results  of  the  all-leveling  char- 
acter of  theistic  belief.  But  these  affections  are  certainly  not 

^  I  have  considerably  abridged  the  words  of  the  original,  which  is 
given  in  Edwards's  Narrative  of  the  Revival  in  New  England. 

^  Bougaud:  Hist,  de  la  Bienheureuse  Marguerite  Marie,  1894,  p. 
125. 


274       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

mere  derivatives  of  theism.  We  find  them  in  Stoicism,  in 
Hinduism,  and  in  Buddhism  in  the  highest  possible  degree. 
They  harmonize  with  paternal  theism  beautifully;  but  they 
harmonize  with  all  reflection  whatever  upon  the  dependence 
of  mankind  on  general  causes;  and  we  must,  I  think,  con- 
sider them  not  subordinate  but  coordinate  parts  of  that  great 
complex  excitement  in  the  study  of  which  we  are  engaged. 
Religious  rapture,  moral  enthusiasm,  ontological  wonder, 
cosmic  emotion,  are  all  unifying  states  of  mind,  in  which 
^he  sand  and  grit  of  the  selfhood  incline  to  disappear,  and 
■  enderness  to  rule.  The  best  thing  is  to  describe  the  condition 
integrally  as  a  characteristic  affection  to  which  our  nature  is 
liable,  a  region  in  which  we  find  ourselves  at  home,  a  sea  in 
which  we  swim;  but  not  to  pretend  to  explain  its  parts  by 
deriving  them  too  cleverly  from  one  another.  Like  love  or 
fear,  the  faith-state  is  a  natural  psychic  complex,  and  carries 
charity  with  it  by  organic  consequence.  Jubilation  is  an  ex- 
pansive affection,  and  all  expansive  affections  are  self-for- 
getful and  kindly  so  long  as  they  endure. 

We  find  this  the  case  even  when  they  are  pathological  in 
origin.  In  his  instructive  work,  la  Tristesse  et  la  Joie,^  M. 
Georges  Dumas  compares  together  the  melancholy  and  the 
joyous  phase  of  circular  insanity,  and  shows  that,  while  self- 
ishness characterizes  the  one,  the  other  is  marked  by  altru- 
'stic  impulses.  No  human  being  so  stingy  and  useless  as  was 
Marie  in  her  melancholy  period!  But  the  moment  the  happy 
period  begins,  "sympathy  and  kindness  become  her  charac- 
teristic sentiments.  She  displays  a  universal  goodwill,  not 
only  of  intention,  but  in  act.  .  .  .  She  becomes  solicitous  of 
the  health  of  other  patients,  interested  in  getting  them  out, 
desirous  to  procure  wool  to  knit  socks  for  some  of  them. 
Never  since  she  has  been  under  my  observation  have  I  heard 

^  Paris,    1900. 


SAINTLINESS  275 

her  in  her  joyous  period  utter  any  but  charitable  opinions."  ^ 
And  later,  Dr.  Dumas  says  of  all  such  joyous  conditions  that 
"unselfish  sentiments  and  tender  emotions  are  the  only  af- 
fective states  to  be  found  in  them.  The  subject's  mind  is 
closed  against  envy,  hatred,  and  vindictiveness,  and  wholly 
transformed  into  benevolence,  indulgence,  and  mercy."  ^ 

There  is  thus  an  organic  affinity  between  joyousness  and 
tenderness,  and  their  companionship  in  the  saintly  life  need 
in  no  way  occasion  surprise.  Along  with  the  happiness,  this 
increase  of  tenderness  is  often  noted  in  narratives  of  con- 
version. "I  began  to  wprk  for  others"; — "I  had  more  tender 
feeling  for  my  family  and  friends"; — "I  spoke  at  once  to  a 
person  with  whom  I  had  been  angry"; — "I  felt  for  every 
one,  and  loved  my  friends  better"; — "I  felt  every  one  to  be 
my  friend"; — these  are  so  many  expressions  from  the  records 
collected  by  Professor  Starbuck.^ 

"When,"  says  Mrs.  Edwards,  continuing  the  narrative  from 
which  I  made  quotation  a  moment  ago,  "I  arose  on  the  morn- 
ing of  the  Sabbath,  I  felt  a  love  to  all  mankind,  wholly  peculiar 
in  its  strength  and  sweetness,  far  beyond  all  that  I  had  ever  felt 
before.  The  power  of  that  love  seemed  inexpressible.  I  thought, 
if  I  were  surrounded  by  enemies,  who  were  venting  their  malice 
and  cruelty  upon  me,  in  tormenting  me,  it  would  still  be  impos- 
sible that  I  should  cherish  any  feelings  towards  them  but  those 
of  love,  and  pity,  and  ardent  desires  for  their  happiness.  I  never 
before  felt  so  far  from  a  disposition  to  judge  and  censure  others, 
as  I  did  that  morning.  I  realized  also,  in  an  unusual  and  very 
lively  manner,  how  great  a  part  of  Christianity  lies  in  the  per- 
formance of  our  social  and  relative  duties  to  one  another.  The 
same  joyful  sense  continued  throughout  the  day — a  sweet  love 
to  God  and  all  mankind." 

^  Page  130. 
^  Page  167. 
^  Op.  cit.,  p.  127. 


276       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELI,GIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Whatever  be  the  explanation  of  the  charity,  it  may  efface 
all  usual  human  barriers.^ 

Here,  for  instance,  is  an  example  of  Christian  non-resist- 
ance from  Richard  Weaver's  autobiography.  Weaver  was  a 
collier,  a  semi-professional  pugilist  in  his  younger  days,  who 
became  a  much  beloved  evangelist.  Fighting,  after  drinking, 
seems  to  have  been  the  sin  to  which  he  originally  felt  his 
flesh  most  perversely  inclined.  After  his  first  conversion  he 
had  a  backsliding,  which  consisted  in  pounding  a  man  who 
had  insulted  a  girl.  Feeling  that,  having  once  fallen,  he 
might  as  well  be  hanged  for  a  sheep  as  for  a  lamb,  he  got 
drunk  and  went  and  broke  the  jaw  of  another  man  who  had 
lately  challenged  him  to  fight  and  taunted  him  with  cow- 
ardice for  refusing  as  a  Christian  man; — I  mention  these 
incidents  to  show  how  genuine  a  change  of  heart  is  implied 
in  the  later  conduct  which  he  describes  as  follows:— 

"I  went  down  the  drift  and  found  the  boy  crying  because  a 

^  The  barrier  between  men  and  animals  also.  We  read  of  Towian- 
ski,  an  eminent  Polish  patriot  and  mystic,  that  "one  day  one  of  his 
friends  met  him  in  the  rain,  caressing  a  big  dog  which  was  jumping 
upon  him  and  covering  him  horribly  with  mud.  On  being  asked 
why  he  permitted  the  animal  thus  to  dirty  his  clothes,  Towianski 
replied:  'This  dog,  whom  I  am  now  meeting  for  the  first  time,  has 
shown  a  great  fellow-feeling  for  me,  and  a  great  joy  in  my  recogni- 
tion and  acceptance  of  his  greetings.  Were  I  to  drive  him  off,  I  should 
wound  his  feelings  and  do  him  a  moral  injury.  It  would  be  an  offense 
not  only  to  him,  but  to  all  the  spirits  of  the  other  world  who  are  on 
the  same  level  with  him.  The  damage  which  he  docs  to  my  coat  is 
as  nothing  in  comparison  with  the  wrong  which  I  should  inflict  upon 
him,  in  case  I  were  to  remain  indifferent  to  the  manifestations  of  his 
friendship.  We  ought,'  he  added,  'both  to  lighten  the  condidon  of 
animals,  whenever  we  can,  and  at  the  same  time  to  facilitate  in  our- 
selves that  union  of  the  world  of  all  spirits,  which  the  sacrifice  of 
Christ  has  made  possible.'  "  Andre  Towianski,  Traducdon  de  I'ltalien, 
Turin,  1897  (privately  printed).  I  owe  my  knowledge  of  this  book 
and  of  Towianski  to  my  friend  Professor  W.  Lutoslawski,  author  of 
"Plato's  Logic." 


SAINTLINESS  277 

fellow-workman  was  trying  to  take  the  wagon  from  him  by 
force.  I  said  to  him: — 

"  'Tom,  you  mustn't  take  that  wagon.' 

"He  swore  at  me,  and  called  me  a  Methodist  devil.  I  told  him 
that  God  did  not  tell  me  to  let  him  rob  me.  He  cursed  again- 
and  said  he  would  push  the  wagon  over  me. 

"  'Well,'  I  said,  'let  us  see  whether  the  devil  and  thee  are 
stronger  than  the  Lord  and  me.' 

"And  the  Lord  and  I  proving  stronger  than  the  devil  and 
he,  he  had  to  get  out  of  the  way,  or  the  wagon  would  have  gone 
over  him.  So  I  gave  the  wagon  to  the  boy.  Then  said  Tom: — 

"  'I've  a  good  mind  to  smack  thee  on  the  face.' 

"  'Well,'  I  said,  'if  that  will  do  thee  any  good,  thou  canst  du 
it.'  So  he  struck  me  on  the  face. 

"I  turned  the  other  cheek  to  him,  and  said,  'Strike  again.' 

"He  struck  again  and  again,  till  he  had  struck  me  five  times. 
I  turned  my  cheek  for  the  sixth  stroke;  but  he  turned  awa\ 
cursing.  I  shouted  after  him:  'The  Lord  forgive  thee,  for  I  do, 
and  the  Lord  save  thee.' 

"This  was  on  a  Saturday;  and  when  I  went  home  from  the 
coal-pit  my  wife  saw  my  face  was  swollen,  and  asked  what  was 
the  matter  with  it.  I  said:  'I've  been  fighting,  and  I've  given  a 
man  a  good  thrashing.' 

"She  burst  out  weeping,  and  said,  'O  Richard,  what  made 
you  fight?'  Then  I  told  her  all  about  it;  and  she  thanked  the 
Lord  I  had  not  struck  back. 

"But  the  Lord  had  struck,  and  his  blows  have  more  effect 
than  man's.  Monday  came.  The  devil  began  to  tempt  me,  say- 
ing: 'The  other  men  will  laugh  at  thee  for  allowing  Tom  to 
treat  thee  as  he  did  on  Saturday.'  I  cried,  'Get  thee  behind  me, 
Satan;' — and  went  on  my  way  to  the  coal-pit. 

"Tom  was  the  first  man  I  saw.  I  said  'Good-morning,'  but 
got  no  reply. 

"He  went  down  first.  When  I  got  down,  I  was  surprised  to 
see  him  sitting  on  the  wagon-road  waiting  for  me.  When  I 
came  to  him  he  burst  into  tears  and  said:  'Richard,  will  you 
forgive  me  for  striking  you.''' 

"  'I  have  forgiven  thee,'  said  I;  'ask  God  to  forgive  thee.  The 


ZyS       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Lord  bless  thee.'  I  gave  him  my  hand,  and  we  went  each  to  his 
work."  ^ 

"Love  your  enemies!"  Mark  you,  not  simply  those  who 
happen  not  to  be  your  friends,  but  your  enemies,  your  pos- 
itive and  active  enemies.  Either  this  is  a  mere  Oriental  hy- 
perbole, a  bit  of  verbal  extravagance,  meaning  only  that  we 
should,  as  far  as  we  can,  abate  our  animosities,  or  else  it  is 
sincere  and  literal.  Outside  of  certain  cases  of  intimate  in- 
dividual relation,  it  seldom  has  been  taken  literally.  Yet  it 
makes  one  ask  the  question :  Can  there  in  general  be  a  level 
of  emotion  so  unifying,  so  obliterative  of  differences  between 
man  and  man,  that  even  enmity  may  come  to  be  an  irrele- 
vant circumstance  and  fail  to  inhibit  the  friendlier  interests 
aroused?  If  positive  well-wishing  could  attain  so  supreme 
a  degree  of  excitement,  those  who  were  swayed  by  it  might 
well  seem  superhuman  beings.  Their  life  would  be  morally 
discrete  from  the  life  of  other  men,  and  there  is  no  saying, 
in  the  absence  of  positive  experience  of  an  authentic  kind — 
for  there  are  few  active  examples  in  our  scriptures,  and  the 
Buddhistic  examples  are  legendary," — what  the  effects  might 
be:  they  might  conceivably  transform  the  world. 

Psychologically  and  in  principle,  the  precept  "Love  your 
enemies"  is  not  self-contradictory.  It  is  merely  the  extreme 
limit  of  a  kind  of  magnanimity  with  which,  in  the  shape  of 
pitying  tolerance  of  our  oppressors,  we  are  fairly  familiar. 
Yet  if  radically  followed,  it  would  involve  such  a  breach 
with  our  instinctive  springs  of  action  as  a  whole,  and  with 
the  present  world's  arrangements,  that  a  critical  point  would 
practically  be  passed,  and  we  should  be  born  into  another 

'  J.  Patterson's  Life  of  Richard  Weaver,  pp.  66-68,  abridged. 

2  As  where  the  future  Buddha,  incarnated  as  a  hare,  jumps  into  the 
fire  to  cook  himself  for  a  meal  for  a  beggar — having  previously 
shaken  himself  three  times,  so  that  none  of  the  insects  in  his  fur 
should  perish  with  him. 


SAINTLINESS  279 

kingdom  of  being.  Religious  emotion  makes  us  feel  that 
other  kingdom  to  be  close  at  hand,  within  our  reach. 

The  inhibition  of  instinctive  repugnance  is  proved  not 
only  by  the  showing  of  love  to  enemies,  but  by  the  showing 
of  it  to  any  one  who  is  personally  loathsome.  In  the  annals 
of  saintliness  we  find  a  curious  mixture  of  motives  impelling 
in  this  direction.  Asceticism  plays  its  part;  and  along  with 
charity  pure  and  simple,  we  find  humility  or  the  desire  to 
disclaim  distinction  and  to  grovel  on  the  common  level  be- 
fore God.  Certainly  all  three  principles  were  at  v/ork  when 
Francis  of  Assisi  and  Ignatius  Loyola  exchanged  their  gar- 
ments with  those  of  filthy  beggars.  All  three  are  at  work 
when  religious  persons  consecrate  their  lives  to  the  care  of 
leprosy  or  other  peculiarly  unpleasant  diseases.  The  nursing 
of  the  sick  is  a  function  to  which  the  religious  seem  strongly 
drawn,  even  apart  from  the  fact  that  church  traditions  set 
that  way.  But  in  the  annals  of  this  sort  of  charity  we  find 
fantastic  excesses  of  devotion  recorded  which  are  only  ex- 
plicable by  the  frenzy  of  self-immolation  simultaneously 
aroused.  Francis  of  Assisi  kisses  his  lepers;  Margaret  Mary 
Alacoque,  Francis  Xavier,  St.  John  of  God,  and  others  arc 
said  to  have  cleansed  the  sores  and  ulcers  of  their  patients 
with  their  respective  tongues;  and  the  lives  of  such  saints  as 
Elizabeth  of  Hungary  and  Madame  de  Chantal  are  full  of 
a  sort  of  reveling  in  hospital  purulencc,  disagreeable  to  read 
of,  and  which  makes  us  admire  and  shudder  at  the  same 
time. 

So  much  for  the  human  love  aroused  by  the  faith-state: 
Let  me  next  speak  of  the  Equanimity,  Resignation,  Ford', 
tude,  and  Patience  which  it  brings. 

"A  paradise  of  inward  tranquillity"  seems  to  be  faith's 
usual  result;  and  it  is  easy,  even  without  being  religious 
one's  self,  to  understand  this.  A  moment  back,  in  treating  of 
the  sense  of  God's  presence,  I  spoke  of  the  unaccountable 


28o       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

feeling  of  safety  which  one  may  then  have.  And,  indeed, 
how  can  it  possibly  fail  to  steady  the  nerves,  to  cool  the  fever, 
and  appease  the  fret,  if  one  be  sensibly  conscious  that,  no 
matter  what  one's  ditlicultics  for  the  moment  may  appear 
to  be,  one's  life  as  a  whole  is  in  the  keeping  of  a  power 
whom  one  can  absolutely  trust?  In  deeply  religious  men  the 
abandonment  of  self  to  this  power  is  passionate.  Whoever 
not  only  says,  but  feels,  "God's  will  be  done,"  's  mailed 
against  every  weakness;  and  the  whole  historic  array  of 
martyrs,  missionaries,  and  religious  reformers  is  there  to 
prove  the  tranquil-mindedness,  under  naturally  agitating  or 
distressing  circumstances,  which  self-surrender  brings. 

The  temper  of  the  tranquil-mindedness  differs,  of  course, 
according  as  the  person  is  of  a  constitutionally  sombre  or  of 
a  constitutionally  cheerful  cast  of  mind.  In  the  sombre  it 
partakes  more  of  resignation  and  submission;  in  the  cheer- 
ful it  is  a  joyous  consent.  As  an  example  of  the  former  tem- 
per, I  quote  part  of  a  letter  from  Professor  Lagneau,  a  ven- 
erated teacher  of  philosophy  who  lately  died,  a  great  invalid, 
at  Paris: — 

"My  life,  for  the  success  of  which  you  send  good  wishes,  will 
be  what  it  is  able  to  be.  I  ask  nothing  from  it,  I  expect  nothing 
from  it.  For  long  years  now  I  exist,  think,  and  act,  and  am 
worth  what  I  am  worth,  only  through  the  despair  which  is  my 
sole  strength  and  my  sole  foundation.  May  it  preserve  for  me, 
even  in  these  last  trials  to  which  I  am  coming,  the  courage  to  do 
without  the  desire  of  deliverance.  I  ask  nothing  more  from  the 
Source  whence  all  strength  cometh,  and  if  that  is  granted,  your 
wishes  will  have  been  accomplished."  ^ 

There  is  something  pathetic  and  fatalistic  about  this,  but 
the  power  of  such  a  tone  as  a  protection  against  outward 
shocks  is  manifest.  Pascal  is  another  Frenchman  of  pessi- 

^  Bulletin  de  I'Union  pour  1' Action  Morale,  September,  1894. 


SAINTLINESS  28l 

mistic  natural  temperament.  Ke  expresses  still  more  amply 
the  temper  of  self-surrendering  submissiveness: — 

"Deliver  me,  Lord,"  he  writes  in  his  prayers,  "from  the  sad- 
ness at  my  proper  suffering  which  self-love  might  give,  but  pu» 
into  me  a  sadness  like  your  own.  Let  my  sufferings  appease 
your  choler.  Make  them  an  occasion  for  my  conversion  and  sal- 
vation. I  ask  you  neither  for  health  nor  for  sickness,  for  life  noi 
for  death;  but  that  you  may  dispose  of  my  health  and  my  sick- 
ness, my  life  and  my  death,  for  your  glory,  for  my  salvation, 
and  for  the  use  of  the  Church  and  of  your  saints,  of  whom  I 
would  by  your  grace  be  one.  You  alone  know  what  is  expedient 
for  me;  you  are  the  sovereign  master;  do  with  me  according  to 
your  will.  Give  to  me,  or  take  away  from  me,  only  conform  my 
will  to  yours.  I  know  but  one  thing.  Lord,  that  it  is  good  to 
follow  you,  and  bad  to  offend  you.  Apart  from  that,  I  know 
not  what  is  good  or  bad  in  anything.  I  know  not  which  is  most 
profitable  to  me,  health  or  sickness,  wealth  or  poverty,  nor  any- 
thing else  in  the  world.  That  discernment  is  beyond  the  power 
of  men  or  angels,  and  is  hidden  among  the  secrets  of  your  Prov- 
idence, which  I  adore,  but  do  not  seek  to  fathom."  ^ 

u 

When  we  reach  more  optimistic  temperaments,  the  res- 
ignation grows  less  passive.  Examples  are  sown  so  broad- 
cast throughout  history  that  I  might  well  pass  on  without 
citation.  As  it  is,  I  snatch  at  the  first  that  occurs  to  my  mind 
Madame  Guyon,  a  frail  creature  physically,  was  yet  of  a 
happy  native  disposition.  She  went  through  many  perils 
with  admirable  serenity  of  soul.  After  being  sent  to  prison 
for  heresy — 

"Some  of  my  friends,"  she  writes,  "wept  bitterly  at  the  hear- 
ing of  it,  but  such  was  my  state  of  acquiescence  and  resignation 
that  it  failed  to  draw  any  tears  from  me.  .  .  .  There  appeared 
to  be  in  me  then,  as  I  find  it  to  be  in  me  now,  such  an  entire 
loss  of  what  regards  myself,  that  any  of  my  own  interests  gave 

^  B.  Pascal:  Prieres  pour  les  Maladies,  §§  xiii.,  xiv.,  abridged. 


282       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

me  little  pain  or  pleasure;  ever  wanting  to  will  or  wish  for  my- 
self only  the  very  thing  which  God  does."  In  another  place  she 
writes:  "We  all  of  us  came  near  perishing  in  a  river  which  we 
found  it  necessary  to  pass.  The  carriage  sank  in  the  quicksand. 
Others  who  were  with  us  threw  themselves  out  in  excessive 
fright.  But  I  found  my  thoughts  so  much  taken  up  with  God 
that  I  had  no  distinct  sense  of  danger.  It  is  true  that  the  thought 
of  being  drowned  passed  across  my  mind,  but  it  cost  no  other 
sensation  or  reflection  in  me  than  this — that  I  felt  quite  con- 
tented and  willing  it  were  so,  if  it  were  my  heavenly  Father's 
choice."  Sailing  from  Nice  to  Genoa,  a  storm  keeps  her  eleven 
days  at  sea.  "As  the  irritated  v/aves  dashed  round  us,"  she 
writes,  "I  could  not  help  experiencing  a  certain  degree  of  satis- 
faction in  my  mind.  I  pleased  myself  with  thinking  that  those 
mutinous  billows,  under  the  command  of  Him  who  does  all 
things  rightly,  might  probably  furnish  me  with  a  watery  grave. 
Perhaps  I  carried  the  point  too  far,  in  the  pleasure  which  I  took 
in  thus  seeing  myself  beaten  and  bandied  by  the  swelling  wa- 
ters. Those  who  were  with  me  took  notice  of  my  intrepidity."  ^ 

The  contempt  of  danger  which  religious  enthusiasm  pro- 
duces may  be  even  more  buoyant  still.  I  take  an  example 
from  that  charming  recent  autobiography,  "With  Christ  at 
Sea,"  by  Frank  Bullen.  A  couple  of  days  after  he  went 
through  the  conversion  on  shipboard  of  which  he  there  gives 
an  account — 

"It  was  blowing  stiffly,"  he  writes,  "and  we  were  carrying  a 
press  of  canvas  to  get  north  out  of  the  bad  weather.  Shortly  after 
four  bells  we  hauled  down  the  flying-jib,  and  I  sprang  out 
:istride  the  boom  to  furl  it.  I  was  sitting  astride  the  boom  when 
suddenly  it  gave  way  with  me.  The  sail  slipped  through  my  fin- 
gers, and  I  fell  backwards,  hanging  head  downwards  over  the 
seething  tumult  of  shining  foam  under  the  ship's  bows,  sus- 
pended by  one  foot.  But  I  felt  only  high  exultation  in  my  cer- 

^  From  Thomas  C.  Upham's  Life  and  Religious  Opinions  and 
Experiences  of  Madame  de  la  Mothe  Guyon,  New  York,  1877,  "•  48, 
i    141,  413,  abridged. 


SAINTLINESS  2S^ 

tainty  of  eternal  life.  Although  death  was  divided  from  me  by 
a  hair's  breadth,  and  I  was  acutely  conscious  of  the  fact,  it  gave 
me  no  sensation  but  joy.  I  suppose  I  could  have  hung  there  no 
longer  than  five  seconds,  but  in  that  time  I  lived  a  whole  age 
of  delight.  But  my  body  asserted  itself,  and  with  a  desperate 
gymnastic  effort  I  regained  the  boom.  How  I  furled  the  sail  I 
don't  know,  but  I  sang  at  the  utmost  pitch  of  my  voice  praises 
to  God  that  went  pealing  out  over  the  dark  waste  of  waters.'  ^ 

The  annals  of  martyrdom  are  of  course  the  signal  field  of 
triumph  for  religious  imperturbability.  Let  me  cite  as  an  ex- 
ample the  statement  of  a  humble  sufferer,  persecuted  as  a 
Huguenot  under  Louis  XIV: — 

"They  shut  all  the  doors,"  Blanche  Gamond  writes,  "and  I 
saw  six  women,  each  with  a  bunch  of  willow  rods  as  thick  as 
the  hand  could  hold,  and  a  yard  long.  He  gave  me  the  order, 
'Undress  yourself,'  which  I  did.  He  said,  'You  are  leaving  on 
your  shift;  you  must  take  it  off.'  They  had  so  little  patience  that 
they  took  it  off  themselves,  and  I  was  naked  from  the  waist  up. 
They  brought  a  cord  with  which  they  tied  me  to  a  beam  in  the 
kitchen.  They  drew  the  cord  tight  with  all  their  strength  and 
asked  me,  'Does  it  hurt  you?'  and  then  they  discharged  their 
fury  upon  me,  exclaiming  as  they  struck  me,  'Pray  now  to  your 
God.'  It  was  the  Roulette  woman  who  held  this  language.  Bu] 
at  this  moment  I  received  the  greatest  consolation  that  I  car\ 
ever  receive  in  my  life,  since  I  had  the  honor  of  being  whipped 
for  the  name  of  Christ,  and  in  addition  of  being  crowned  with 
his  mercy  and  his  consolations.  Why  can  I  not  write  down  the 
inconceivable  influences,  consolations,  and  peace  which  I  felt 
interiorly?  To  understand  them  one  must  have  passed  by  the 
same  trial;  they  were  so  great  that  I  was  ravished,  for  there 
where  afflictions  abound  grace  is  given  superabundantly.  In 
vain  the  women  cried,  'We  must  double  our  blov/s;  she  does  nc* 
feel  them,  for  she  neither  speaks  nor  cries.'  And  how  should  I 
have  cried,  since  I  was  swooning  with  happiness  within?"" 

^  Op.  cit.,  London,  1901,  p.  130. 

-Claparede  et  Goty:  Deux  Heroines  de  la  Foi,  Paris,  1880,  p.  ri2. 


284       THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

The  transition  from  tenseness,  self-responsibility,  and  wor- 
ry, to  equanimity,  receptivity,  and  peace,  is  the  most  won- 
derful of  all  those  shiftings  of  inner  equilibrium,  those 
changes  of  the  personal  centre  of  energy,  which  I  have  an- 
alyzed so  often;  and  the  chief  wonder  of  it  is  that  it  so  often 
comes  about,  not  by  doing,  but  by  simply  relaxing  and 
throwing  the  burden  down.  This  abandonment  of  self-res- 
ponsibility seems  to  be  the  fundamental  act  in  specifically 
religious,  as  distinguished  from  moral  practice.  It  antedates 
theologies  and  is  independent  of  philosophies.  Mind-cure, 
theosophy,  stoicism,  ordinary  neurological  hygiene,  insist  on 
it  as  emphatically  as  Christianity  does,  and  it  is  capable  of 
entering  into  closest  marriage  with  every  speculative  creed.-^ 
Christians  who  have  it  strongly  live  in  what  is  called  "rec- 
ollection," and  are  never  anxious  about  the  future,  nor  worry 
over  the  outcome  of  the  day.  Of  Saint  Catharine  of  Genoa 
it  is  said  that  "she  took  cognizance  of  things,  only  as  they 
were  presented  to  her  in  succession,  moment  by  moment." 
To  her  holy  soul,  "the  divine  moment  was  the  present  mo- 
ment, .  .  .  and  when  the  present  moment  was  estimated  in 
itself  and  in  its  relations,  and  when  the  duty  that  was  in- 
volved in  it  was  accomplished,  it  was  permitted  to  pass 
away  as  if  it  had  never  been,  and  to  give  way  to  the  facts 
and  duties  of  the  moment  which  came  after."  ^  Hinduism, 
mind-cure,  and  theosophy  all  lay  great  emphasis  upon  this 
concentration  of  the  consciousness  upon  the  moment  at 
hand. 

^  Compare  these  three  different  statements  of  it:  A.  P.  Call:  As  a 
Matter  of  Course,  Boston,  1894;  H.  W.  Dresser:  Living  by  the  Spirit, 
New  York  and  London,  1900;  H.  W.  Smith:  The  Christian's  Secret 
of  a  Happy  Life,  pubhshecl  by  the  Willard  Tract  Repository,  and 
now  in  thousands  of  hands. 

-T.  C.  Upham:  Life  of  Madame  Catharine  Adorna,  3d  ed.,  New 
York,  1864,  pp.  158,  172-74. 


SAINTLINESS  285 

The  next  religious  symptom  which  I  will  note  is  what  I 
have  called  Purity  of  Life.  The  saintly  person  becomes  ex- 
ceedingly sensitive  to  inner  inconsistency  or  discord,  and 
mixture  and  confusion  grow  intolerable.  All  the  mind's  ob- 
jects and  occupations  must  be  ordered  with  reference  to  the 
special  spiritual  excitement  which  is  now  its  keynote.  What- 
ever is  unspiritual  taints  the  pure  water  of  the  soul  and  is 
repugnant.  Mixed  with  this  exaltation  of  the  moral  sensibil- 
ities there  is  also  an  ardor  of  sacrifice,  for  the  beloved  deity's 
sake,  of  everything  unworthy  of  him.  Sometimes  the  spir- 
itual ardor  is  so  sovereign  that  purity  is  achieved  at  a  stroke 
— we  have  seen  examples.  Usually  it  is  a  more  gradual  con- 
quest. Billy  Bray's  account  of  his  abandonment  of  tobacco 
is  a  good  example  of  the  latter  form  of  achievement. 

"I  had  been  a  smoker  as  well  as  a  drunkard,  and  I  used  to 
love  my  tobacco  as  much  as  I  loved  my  meat,  and  I  would  rather 
go  down  into  the  mine  without  my  dinner  than  without  my 
pipe.  In  the  days  of  old,  the  Lord  spoke  by  the  mouths  of  his 
servants,  the  prophets;  now  he  speaks  to  us  by  the  spirit  of  his 
Son.  I  had  not  only  the  feeling  part  of  religion,  but  I  could  hear 
the  small,  still  voice  within  speaking  to  me.  When  I  took  the 
pipe  to  smoke,  it  would  be  applied  within,  'It  is  an  idol,  a  lust; 
worship  the  Lord  with  clean  lips.'  So,  I  felt  it  was  not  right  to 
smoke.  The  Lord  also  sent  a  woman  to  convince  me.  I  was  one 
day  in  a  house,  and  I  took  out  my  pipe  to  light  it  at  the  fire,  and 
Mary  Hawke — for  that  was  the  woman's  name — said,  'Do  you 
not  feel  it  is  wrong  to  smoke?'  I  said  that  I  felt  something  in- 
side telling  me  that  it  was  an  idol,  a  lust,  and  she  said  that  was 
the  Lord.  Then  I  said,  'Now,  I  must  give  it  up,  for  the  Lord  is 
telling  me  of  it  inside,  and  the  woman  outside,  so  the  tobacco 
must  go,  love  it  as  I  may.'  There  and  then  I  took  the  tobacco 
out  of  my  pocket,  and  threw  it  into  the  fire,  and  put  the  pipe 
under  my  foot,  'ashes  to  ashes,  dust  to  dust.'  And  I  have  nov 
smoked  since.  I  found  it  hard  to  break  off  old  habits,  but  I  cried 
to  the  Lord  for  help,  and  he  gave  me  strength,  for  he  has  said. 


286       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

'Call  upon  me  in  the  day  of  trouble,  and  I  will  deliver  thee.' 
The  day  after  I  gave  up  smoking  I  had  the  toothache  so  bad 
that  I  did  not  know  what  to  do.  I  thought  this  was  owing  to 
giving  up  the  pipe,  but  I  said  I  would  never  smoke  again,  if  I 
lost  every  tooth  in  my  head.  I  said,  'Lord,  thou  hast  told  us 
My  yoke  is  easy  and  my  burden  is  light,'  and  when  I  said  that, 
all  the  pain  left  me.  Sometimes  the  thought  of  the  pipe  would 
come  back  to  me  very  strong;  but  the  Lord  strengthened  me 
against  the  habit,  and,  bless  his  name,  I  have  not  smoked  since." 
Bray's  biographer  writes  that  after  he  had  given  up  smoking, 
he  thought  that  he  would  chew  a  little,  but  he  conquered  this 
^dirty  habit,  too.  "On  one  occasion,"  Bray  said,  "when  at  a  pray- 
er-meeting at  Hicks  Mill,  I  heard  the  Lord  say  to  me,  "Worship 
me  with  clean  lips.'  So,  when  we  got  up  from  our  knees,  I  took 
the  quid  out  of  my  mouth  and  'whipped  'en'  [threw  it]  under 
the  form.  But,  when  we  got  on  our  knees  again,  I  put  another 
quid  into  my  mouth.  Then  the  Lord  said  to  me  again,  'Wor- 
ship me  with  clean  lips.'  So  I  took  the  quid  out  of  my  mouth, 
and  whipped  'en  under  the  form  again,  and  said,  'Yes,  Lord,  I 
will.'  From  that  time  I  gave  up  chewing  as  well  as  smoking,  and 
have  been  a  free  man." 

The  ascetic  forms  which  the  impulse  for  veracity  and  pur- 
ity of  life  may  take  are  often  pathetic  enough.  The  early 
Quakers,  for  example,  had  hard  battles  to  wage  against  the 
worldliness  and  insincerity  of  the  ecclesiastical  Christianity 
of  their  time.  Yet  the  battle  that  cost  them  most  wounds  was 
probably  that  which  they  fought  in  defense  of  their  own 
right  to  social  veracity  and  sincerity  in  their  thee-ing  and 
thou-ing,  in  not  doffing  the  hat  or  giving  titles  of  respect. 
It  was  laid  on  George  Fox  that  these  conventional  customs 
were  a  lie  and  a  sham,  and  the  whole  body  of  his  followers 
thereupon  renounced  them,  as  a  sacrifice  to  truth,  and  so  that 
their  acts  and  the  spirit  they  professed  might  be  more  in 
accord. 

"When  the  Lord  sent  me  into  the  world,"  says  Fox  in  his 
Journal,  "he  forbade  me  to  put  off  my  hat  to  any,  high  or  low: 


SAINTLINESS  287 

and  I  was  required  to  'thee*  and  'thou'  all  men  and  women, 
without  any  respect  to  rich  or  poor,  great  or  small.  And  as  I 
traveled  up  and  down,  I  was  not  to  bid  people  Good-morning, 
or  Good-evening,  neither  might  I  bow  or  scrape  with  my  leg  to 
any  one.  This  made  the  sects  and  professions  rage.  Oh!  the  rage 
that  was  in  the  priests,  magistrates,  professors,  and  people  of  all 
sorts:  and  especially  in  priests  and  professors:  for  though  'thou' 
to  a  single  person  was  according  to  their  accidence  and  gram- 
mar rules,  and  according  to  the  Bible,  yet  they  could  not  bear  to 
hear  it:  and  because  I  could  not  put  off  my  hat  to  them,  it  set 
them  all  into  a  rage.  .  .  .  Oh!  the  scorn,  heat,  and  fury  that 
arose!  Oh!  the  blows,  punchings,  beatings,  and  imprisonments 
that  we  underwent  for  not  putting  off  our  hats  to  men!  Some 
had  their  hats  violently  plucked  off  and  thrown  away,  so  that 
they  quite  lost  them.  The  bad  language  and  evil  usage  we  re- 
ceived on  this  account  is  hard  to  be  expressed,  besides  the  danger 
we  were  sometimes  in  of  losing  our  lives  for  this  matter,  and 
that  by  the  great  professors  of  Christianity,  who  thereby  discov- 
ered they  were  not  true  believers.  And  though  it  was  but  a  small 
thing  in  the  eye  of  man,  yet  a  wonderful  confusion  it  brought 
among  all  professors  and  priests:  but,  blessed  be  the  Lord,  many 
came  to  see  the  vanity  of  that  custom  of  putting  off  hats  to  men, 
and  felt  the  weight  of  Truth's  testimony  against  it." 

In  the  autobiography  of  Thomas  Elwood,  an  early  Quale, 
er,  who  at  one  time  was  secretary  to  John  Milton,  we  find 
an  exquisitely  quaint  and  candid  account  of  the  trials  he  un- 
derwent both  at  home  and  abroad,  in  following  Fox's  can- 
ons of  sincerity.  The  anecdotes  are  too  lengthy  for  citation; 
but  Elwood  sets  down  his  manner  of  feeling  about  these 
things  in  a  shorter  passage,  which  I  will  quote  as  a  charac- 
teristic utterance  of  spiritual  sensibility: — 

"By  this  divine  light,  then,"  says  Elwood,  "I  saw  that  though 
I  had  not  the  evil  of  the  common  uncleanliness,  debauchery, 
profaneness,  and  pollutions  of  the  world  to  put  away,  because 
I  had,  through  the  great  goodness  of  God  and  a  civil  education 
been  preserved  out  of  those  grosser  evils,  yet  I  had  many  othe/ 


288       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

evils  to  put  away  and  to  cease  from;  some  of  which  were  not  by 
the  world,  which  lies  in  wickedness  (i  John  v.  19),  accounted 
evils,  but  by  the  light  of  Christ  were  made  manifest  to  me  to  be 
evils,  and  as  such  condemned  in  me. 

"As  particularly  those  fruits  and  effects  of  pride  that  dis- 
cover themselves  in  the  vanity  and  superfluity  of  apparel;  which 
I  took  too  much  delight  in.  This  evil  of  my  doings  I  was  re- 
quired to  put  away  and  cease  from;  and  judgment  lay  upon  me 
lill  I  did  so. 

"I  took  off  from  my  apparel  those  unnecessary  trimmings  of 
lace,  ribbons,  and  useless  buttons,  which  had  no  real  service,  but 
were  set  on  only  for  that  which  was  by  mistake  called  orna- 
ment; and  I  ceased  to  wear  rings. 

"Again,  the  giving  of  flattering  titles  to  men  betvi^een  whom 
and  me  there  was  not  a-ny  relation  to  which  such  titles  could  be 
pretended  to  belong.  This  was  an  evil  I  had  been  much  addicted 
to,  and  was  accounted  a  ready  artist  in;  therefore  this  evil  also 
was  I  required  to  put  away  and  cease  from.  So  that  thencefor- 
ward I  durst  not  say,  Sir,  Master,  My  Lord,  Madam  (or  My 
Dame);  or  say  Your  Servant  to  any  one  to  whom  I  did  not 
stand  in  the  real  relation  of  a  servant,  which  I  had  never  done 
to  any. 

"Again,  respect  of  persons,  in  uncovering  the  head  and  bow- 
ing the  knee  or  body  in  salutation,  was  a  practice  I  had  been 
much  in  the  use  of;  and  this,  being  one  of  the  vain  customs  of 
the  world,  introduced  by  the  spirit  of  the  world,  instead  of  the 
true  honor  which  this  is  a  false  representation  of,  and  used  in 
deceit  as  a  token  of  respect  by  persons  one  to  another,  who  bear 
no  real  respect  one  to  another;  and  besides  this,  being  a  type  and 
a  proper  emblem  of  that  divine  honor  which  all  ought  to  pay 
to  Almighty  God,  and  which  all  of  all  sorts,  who  take  upon 
them  the  Christian  name,  appear  in  when  they  offer  their  pray- 
ers to  him,  and  therefore  should  not  be  given  to  men; — I  found 
this  to  be  one  of  those  evils  which  I  had  been  too  long  doing; 
therefore  I  was  now  required  to  put  it  away  and  cease  from  it. 

"Again,  the  corrupt  and  unsound  form  of  speaking  in  the 
plural  number  to  a  single  person,  you  to  one,  instead  of  ihou, 
contrary  to  the  pure,  plain,  and  single  language  of  truth,  thou 


SAINTLINESS  289 

to  one,  and  you  to  more  than  one,  which  had  always  been  used 
by  God  to  men,  and  men  to  God,  as  well  as  one  to  another,  from 
the  oldest  record  of  time  till  corrupt  men,  for  corrupt  ends,  in 
later  and  corrupt  times,  to  flatter,  fawn,  and  work  upon  the 
corrupt  nature  in  men,  brought  in  that  false  and  senseless  way 
of  speaking  you  to  one,  which  has  since  corrupted  the  modern 
languages,  and  hath  greatly  debased  the  spirits  and  depraved 
the  manners  of  men; — this  evil  custom  I  had  been  as  forward  in 
as  others,  and  this  I  was  now  called  out  of  and  required  to  cease 
from. 

"These  and  many  more  evil  customs  which  had  sprving  up  in 
the  night  of  darkness  and  general  apostasy  from  the  truth  and 
true  religion  v/ere  now,  by  the  inshining  of  this  pure  ray  of 
divine  light  in  my  conscience,  gradually  discovered  to  me  to  be 
what  I  ought  to  cease  from,  shun,  and  stand  a  witness  against."  ^ 

These  early  Quakers  were  Puritans  indeed.  The  slightest 
inconsistency  between  profession  and  deed  jarred  some  of 
them  to  active  protest.  John  Woolman  writes  in  his  diary: — 

"In  these  journeys  I  have  been  where  much  cloth  hath  been 
dyed;  and  have  at  sundry  times  walked  over  ground  where 
much  of  their  dyestuffs  has  drained  away.  This  hath  produced 
a  longing  in  my  mind  that  people  might  come  into  cleanness 
of  spirit,  cleanness  of  person,  and  cleanness  about  their  houses 
and  garments.  Dyes  being  invented  partly  to  please  the  eye,  and 
partly  to  hide  dirt,  I  have  felt  in  this  weak  state,  when  traveling 
in  dirtiness,  and  affected  with  unwholesome  scents,  a  strong 
desire  that  the  nature  of  dyeing  cloth  to  hide  dirt  may  be  more 
fully  considered. 

"Washing  our  garments  to  keep  them  sweet  is  cleanly,  but  it 
is  the  opposite  to  real  cleanliness  to  hide  dirt  in  them.  Through 
giving  way  to  hiding  dirt  in  our  garments  a  spirit  which  would 
conceal  that  which  is  disagreeable  is  strengthened.  Real  clean- 
liness becometh  a  holy  people;  but  hiding  that  which  is  not  clean 
by  coloring  our  garments  seems  contrary  to  the  sweetness  of 

^  The  History  of  Thomas  Elwood,  written  by  Himself,  London, 
1885,  pp.  32-34. 


290       THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Sincerity.  Through  some  sorts  of  dyes  cloth  is  rendered  less  use- 
ful. And  if  the  value  of  dyestuffs,  and  expense  of  dyeing,  and 
the  damage  done  to  cloth,  were  all  added  together,  and  that  cost 
applied  to  keeping  all  sweet  and  clean,  how  much  more  would 
real  cleanliness  prevail. 

"Thinking  often  on  these  things,  the  use  of  hats  and  gar- 
ments dyed  with  a  dye  hurtful  to  them,  and  wearing  more 
clothes  in  summer  than  are  useful,  grew  more  uneasy  to  me; 
believing  them  to  be  customs  which  have  not  their  foundation 
in  pure  wisdom.  The  apprehension  of  being  singular  from  my 
beloved  friends  was  a  strait  upon  me;  and  thus  I  continued  in 
the  use  of  some  things,  contrary  to  my  judgment,  about  nine 
months.  Then  I  thought  of  getting  a  hat  the  natural  color  of  the 
fur,  but  the  apprehension  of  being  looked  upon  as  one  affecting 
singularity  felt  uneasy  to  me.  On  this  account  I  was  under  close 
exercise  of  mind  in  the  time  of  our  general  spring  meeting  in 
1762,  greatly  desiring  to  be  rightly  directed;  when,  being  deeply 
bowed  in  spirit  before  the  Lord,  I  was  made  willing  to  submit 
to  what  I  apprehended  was  required  of  me;  and  when  I  returned 
home,  got  a  hat  of  the  natural  color  of  the  fur. 

"In  attending  meetings,  this  singularity  was  a  trial  to  me,  and 
more  especially  at  this  time,  as  white  hats  were  used  by  some 
who  were  fond  of  following  the  changeable  modes  of  dress,  and 
as  some  friends,  who  knew  not  from  what  motives  I  wore  it, 
grew  shy  of  me,  I  felt  my  way  for  a  time  shut  up  in  the  exercise 
of  the  ministry.  Some  friends  were  apprehensive  that  my  wear- 
ing such  a  hat  savored  of  an  affected  singularity:  those  who 
spoke  with  me  in  a  friendly  way,  I  generally  informed  in  a  few 
words,  that  I  believed  my  wearing  it  was  not  in  my  own  will." 

When  the  craving  for  moral  consistency  and  purity  is 
developed  to  this  degree,  the  subject  may  well  find  the  outer 
world  too  full  of  shocks  to  dwell  in,  and  can  unify  his  life 
and  keep  his  soul  unspotted  only  by  withdrawing  from  it. 
That  law  which  impels  the  artist  to  achieve  harmony  in  his 
composition  by  simply  dropping  out  whatever  jars,  or  sug- 
gests a  discord,  rules  also  in  the  spiritual  life.  To  omit,  says 
Stevenson,  is  the  one  art  in  literature:  "If  I  knew  how  to 


SAINTLINESS  291 

omit,  I  should  ask  no  other  knowledge."  And  life,  when  full 
of  disorder  and  slackness  and  vague  superfluity,  can  no 
more  have  what  we  call  character  than  literature  can  have  it 
under  similar  conditions.  So  monasteries  and  communities 
of  sympathetic  devotees  open  their  doors,  and  in  their 
changeless  order,  characterized  by  omissions  quite  as  much 
as  constituted  of  actions,  the  holy-minded  person  finds  that 
inner  smoothness  and  cleanness  which  it  is  torture  to  him  to 
feel  violated  at  every  turn  by  the  discordancy  and  brutality 
of  secular  existence. 

That  the  scrupulosity  of  purity  may  be  carried  to  a  fan- 
tastic extreme  must  be  admitted.  In  this  it  resembles  Asceti- 
cism,  to  which  further  symptom  of  saintliness  we  had  better 
turn  next.  The  adjective  "ascetic"  is  applied  to  conduct  orig- 
inating on  diverse  psychological  levels,  which  I  might  as 
well  begin  by  distinguishing  from  one  another. 

1.  Asceticism  may  be  a  mere  expression  of  organic  hardi' 
hood,  disgusted  with  too  much  ease. 

2.  Temperance  in  meat  and  drink,  simplicity  of  apparel, 
chastity,  and  non-pampering  of  the  body  generally,  may  be 
fruits  of  the  love  of  purity,  shocked  by  whatever  savors  of 
the  sensual. 

3.  They  may  also  be  fruits  of  love,  that  is,  they  may  ap- 
peal to  the  subject  in  the  light  of  sacrifices  which  he  is  happy 
in  making  to  the  Deity  whom  he  acknowledges. 

4.  Again,  ascetic  mortifications  and  torments  may  be  due 
to  pessimistic  feelings  about  the  self,  combined  with  theolog- 
ical beliefs  concerning  expiation.  The  devotee  may  feel  that 
he  is  buying  himself  free,  or  escaping  worse  sufferings  here- 
after, by  doing  penance  now. 

5.  In  psychopathic  persons,  mortifications  may  be  entered 
on  irrationally,  by  a  sort  of  obsession  or  fixed  idea  which 
comes  as  a  challenge  and  must  be  worked  off,  because  only 


292       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

thus  does  the  subject  get  his  interior  consciousness  feeling 
right  again. 

6.  Finally,  ascetic  exercises  may  in  rarer  instances  be 
prompted  by  genuine  perversions  of  the  bodily  sensibility, 
in  consequence  of  which  normally  pain-giving  stimuli  are 
actually  felt  as  pleasures. 

I  will  try  to  give  an  instance  under  each  of  these  heads 
in  turn;  but  it  is  not  easy  to  get  them  pure,  for  in  cases  pro- 
nounced enough  to  be  immediately  classed  as  ascetic,  several 
of  the  assigned  motives  usually  work  together.  Moreover, 
before  citing  any  examples  at  all,  I  must  invite  you  to  some 
general  pyschological  considerations  which  apply  to  all  of 
them  alike. 

A  strange  moral  transformation  has  within  the  past  cen- 
tury swept  over  our  Western  world.  We  no  longer  think 
that  we  are  called  on  to  face  physical  pain  with  equanimity. 
It  is  not  expected  of  a  man  that  he  should  either  endure  it 
or  inflict  much  of  it,  and  to  listen  to  the  recital  of  cases  of 
it  makes  our  flesh  creep  morally  as  well  as  physically.  The 
way  in  which  our  ancestors  looked  upon  pain  as  an  eternal 
ingredient  of  the  world's  order,  and  both  caused  and  suf- 
fered it  as  a  matter-of-course  portion  of  their  day's  work, 
fills  us  with  amazement.  We  wonder  that  any  human  beings 
could  have  been  so  callous.  The  result  of  this  historic  alter- 
ation is  that  even  in  the  Mother  Church  herself,  where  as- 
cetic discipline  has  such  a  fixed  traditional  prestige  as  a  fac- 
tor of  merit,  it  has  largely  come  into  desuetude,  if  not  dis- 
credit. A  believer  who  flagellates  or  "macerates"  himself  to- 
day arouses  more  wonder  and  fear  than  emulation.  Many 
Catholic  writers  who  admit  that  the  times  have  changed  in 
this  respect  do  so  resignedly;  and  even  add  that  perhaps  it 
is  as  well  not  to  waste  feelings  in  regretting  the  matter,  for 
to  return  to  the  heroic  corporeal  discipline  of  ancient  days 
might  be  an  extravagance. 

Where  to  seek  the  easy  and  the  pleasant  seems  instinctive 


SAINTLINESS  293 

" — and  instinctive  it  appears  to  be  in  man;  any  deliberate  ten- 
dency to  pursue  the  hard  and  painful  as  such  and  for  their 
own  sakes  might  well  strike  one  as  purely  abnormal.  Nev- 
ertheless, in  moderate  degrees  it  is  natural  and  even  usual  to 
human  nature  to  court  the  arduous.  It  is  only  the  extreme 
manifestations  of  the  tendency  that  can  be  regarded  as  a 
paradox. 

The  psychological  reasons  for  this  lie  near  the  surface. 
When  we  drop  abstractions  and  take  what  we  call  our  will 
in  the  act,  we  see  that  it  is  a  very  complex  function.  It  in- 
volves both  stimulations  and  inhibitions;  it  follows  general- 
ized habits;  it  is  escorted  by  reflective  criticisms;  and  it 
leaves  a  good  or  a  bad  taste  of  itself  behind,  according  to 
the  manner  of  the  performance.  The  result  is  that,  quite 
apart  from  the  immediate  pleasure  which  any  sensible  ex- 
perience may  give  us,  our  own  general  moral  attitude  in 
procuring  or  undergoing  the  experience  brings  with  it  a 
secondary  satisfaction  or  distaste.  Some  men  and  women,  in- 
deed, there  are  who  can  live  on  smiles  and  the  word  "yes' 
forever.  But  for  others  (indeed  for  most),  this  is  too  tepid  and 
relaxed  a  moral  climate.  Passive  happiness  is  slack  and  in- 
sipid, and  soon  grows  mawkish  and  intolerable.  Some  aus- 
terity and  wintry  negativity,  some  roughness,  danger,  strin- 
gency, and  effort,  some  "no!  no!"  must  be  mixed  in,  to  pro- 
duce the  sense  of  an  existence  with  character  and  texture 
and  power.  The  range  of  individual  differences  in  this  re- 
spect is  enormous;  but  whatever  the  mixture  of  yeses  and 
noes  may  be,  the  person  is  infallibly  aware  when  he  has 
struck  it  in  the  right  proportion  for  him.  This,  he  feels,  is 
my  proper  vocation,  this  is  the  optimujn,  the  law,  the  life 
for  me  to  live.  Here  I  find  the  degree  of  equilibrium,  safety, 
calm,  and  leisure  which  I  need,  or  here  I  find  the  challenge, 
passion,  fight,  and  hardship  without  which  my  soul's  energy 
expires. 

Every  individual  soul,  in  short,  like  every  individual  ma- 


^94       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

chine  or  organism,  has  its  own  best  conditions  of  efficiency. 
A  given  machine  will  run  best  under  a  certain  steam-pres- 
sure, a  certain  amperage;  an  organism  under  a  certain  diet, 
iveight,  or  exercise.  You  seem  to  do  best,  I  heard  a  doctor 
say  to  a  patient,  at  about  140  millimeters  of  arterial  tension. 
And  it  is  just  so  with  our  sundry  souls:  some  are  happiest 
in  calm  weather;  some  need  the  sense  of  tension,  of  strong 
volition,  to  make  them  feel  alive  and  well.  For  these  latter 
souls,  whatever  is  gained  from  day  to  day  must  be  paid  for 
by  sacrifice  and  inhibition,  or  else  it  comes  too  cheap  and 
has  no  zest. 

Now  when  characters  of  this  latter  sort  become  reli- 
gious, they  are  apt  to  turn  the  edge  of  their  need  of  eflFort  and 
negativity  against  their  natural  self;  and  the  ascetic  life  gets 
evolved  as  a  consequence. 

When  Professor  Tyndall  in  one  of  his  lectures  tells  us 
that  Thomas  Carlyle  put  him  into  his  bath-tub  every  morn- 
ing of  a  freezing  Berlin  winter,  he  proclaimed  one  of  the 
lowest  grades  of  asceticism.  Even  without  Carlyle,  most  of 
us  find  it  necessary  to  our  soul's  health  to  start  the  day  with 
a  rather  cool  immersion.  A  little  farther  along  the  scale  we 
get  such  statements  as  this,  from  one  of  my  correspondents, 
an  agnostic: — 

"Often  at  night  in  my  warm  bed  I  would  feel  ashamed  to  de- 
pend so  on  the  warmth,  and  whenever  the  thought  would  come 
over  me  I  would  have  to  get  up,  no  matter  what  time  of  night 
it  was,  and  stand  for  a  minute  in  the  cold,  just  so  as  to  prove  my 
manhood." 

Such  cases  as  these  belong  simply  to  our  head  i.  In  the 
next  case  wc  probably  have  a  mixture  of  heads  2  and  3 — 
the  asceticism  becomes  far  more  systematic  and  pronounced. 
The  writer  is  a  Protestant,  whose  sense  of  moral  energy 
could  doubtless  be  gratified  on  no  lower  terms,  and  I  take 
his  case  from  Starbuck's  manuscript  collection. 


SAINTLINESS  295 

"I  practiced  fasting  and  mortification  of  the  flesh.  I  secretly 
made  burlap  shirts,  and  put  the  burrs  next  the  skin,  and  wore 
pebbles  in  my  shoes.  I  would  spend  nights  flat  on  my  back  on 
the  floor  without  any  covering." 

The  Roman  Church  has  organized  and  codified  all  this 
sort  of  thing,  and  given  it  a  market-value  in  the  shape  of 
"merit."  But  we  see  the  cultivation  of  hardship  cropping  out 
under  every  sky  and  in  every  faith,  as  a  spontaneous  need 
of  character.  Thus  we  read  of  Channing,  when  first  settled 
as  a  Unitarian  minister,  that — 

"He  was  now  more  simple  than  ever,  and  seemed  to  have  be- 
come incapable  of  any  form  of  self-indulgence.  He  took  the 
smallest  room  in  the  house  for  his  study,  though  he  might  easily 
have  commanded  one  more  light,  airy,  and  in  every  way  more 
suitable;  and  chose  for  his  sleeping  chamber  an  attic  which  he 
shared  with  a  younger  brother.  The  furniture  of  the  latter  might 
have  answered  for  the  cell  of  an  anchorite,  and  consisted  of  a 
hard  mattress  on  a  cot-bedstead,  plain  wooden  chairs  and  table, 
with  matting  on  the  floor.  It  was  without  fire,  and  to  cold  he 
was  throughout  life  extremely  sensitive;  but  he  never  com- 
plained or  appeared  in  any  way  to  be  conscious  of  inconvenience. 
'I  recollect,'  says  his  brother,  'after  one  most  severe  night,  thar 
in  the  morning  he  sportively  thus  alluded  to  his  suffering:  "I."' 
my  bed  were  my  country,  I  should  be  somewhat  like  Bonapartei 
I  have  no  control  except  over  the  part  which  I  occupy;  the  in- 
stant I  move,  frost  takes  possession."  '  In  sickness  only  would 
he  change  for  the  time  his  apartment  and  accept  a  few  comforts. 
The  dress  too  that  he  habitually  adopted  was  of  most  inferior 
quality;  and  garments  were  constantly  worn  which  the  world 
would,  call  mean,  though  an  almost  feminine  neatness  preserved 
him  from  the  least  appearance  of  neglect."  ^ 

Channing's  asceticism,  such  as  it  was,  was  evidently  a 
compound  of  hardihood  and  love  of  purity.  The  democracy 
which  is  an  ofTshoot  of  the  enthusiasm  of  humanity,  and  of 

^  Memoirs  of  W.  E.  Channing,  Boston,  1840,  i.  196. 


296       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

which  I  will  speak  later  under  the  head  of  the  cult  of  pov- 
erty, doubtless  bore  also  a  share.  Certainly  there  was  no  pes- 
simistic element  in  his  case.  In  the  next  case  we  have  a 
strongly  pessimistic  element,  so  that  it  belongs  under  head 
4.  John  Cennick  v^^as  Methodism's  first  lay  preacher.  In  1735 
he  was  convicted  of  sin,  while  walking  in  Cheapside — 

"And  at  once  left  off  sing-singing,  card-playing,  and  attend- 
ing theatres.  Sometimes  he  wished  to  go  to  a  popish  monastery, 
to  spend  his  life  in  devout  retirement.  At  other  times  he  longed 
to  live  in  a  cave,  sleeping  on  fallen  leaves,  and  feeding  on  forest 
fruits.  He  fasted  long  and  often,  and  prayed  nine  times  a  day. 
.  .  .  Fancying  dry  bread  too  great  an  indulgence  for  so  great 
a  sinner  as  himself,  he  began  to  feed  on  potatoes,  acorns,  crabs, 
and  grass;  and  often  wished  that  he  could  live  on  roots  and 
herbs.  At  length,  in  1737,  he  found  peace  with  God,  and  went 
on  his  way  rejoicing."  ■*■ 

In  this  poor  man  we  have  morbid  melancholy  and  fear, 
and  the  sacrifices  made  are  to  purge  out  sin,  and  to  buy 
safety.  The  hopelessness  of  Christian  theology  in  respect  of 
the  flesh  and  the  natural  man  generally  has,  in  systematizing 
fear,  made  of  it  one  tremendous  incentive  to  self-mortifica- 
tion. It  would  be  quite  unfair,  however,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  this  incentive  has  often  been  worked  in  a  mercenary 
way  for  hortatory  purposes,  to  call  it  a  mercenary  incentive. 
The  impulse  to  expiate  and  do  penance  is,  in  its  first  inten- 
tion, far  too  immediate  and  spontaneous  an  expression  of 
self-despair  and  anxiety  to  be  obnoxious  to  any  such  re- 
proach. In  the  form  of  loving  sacrifice,  of  spending  all  we 
have  to  show  our  devotion,  ascetic  discipline  of  the  severest 
sort  may  be  the  fruit  of  highly  optimistic  religious  feeling. 

M.  Vianney,  the  cure  of  Ars,  was  a  French  country  priest, 
whose  holiness  was  exemplary.  We  read  in  his  life  the  fol- 
lowing account  of  his  inner  need  of  sacrifice: — 

^  L.  Tyerman:  The  Life  and  Times  of  the  Rev.  John  Wesley,  i.  274. 


SAINTLINESS  297 

"  'On  this  path,'  M.  Vianney  said,  "it  is  only  the  first  step  that 
costs.  There  is  in  mortification  a  balm  and  a  savor  without 
which  one  cannot  live  when  once  one  has  made  their  acquaint- 
ance. There  is  but  one  way  in  which  to  give  one's  self  to  God — 
that  is,  to  give  one's  self  entirely,  and  to  keep  nothing  for  one's 
self.  The  little  that  one  keeps  is  only  good  to  trouble  one  and 
make  one  suffer.'  Accordingly  he  imposed  it  on  himself  that  he 
should  never  smell  a  flower,  never  drink  when  parched  with 
thirst,  never  drive  away  a  fly,  never  show  disgust  before  a  re- 
pugnant object,  never  complain  of  anything  that  had  to  do  with 
his  personal  comfort,  never  sit  down,  never  lean  upon  his  el- 
bows when  he  was  kneeling.  The  Cure  of  Ars  was  very  sensi- 
tive to  cold,  but  he  would  never  take  means  to  protect  himself 
against  it.  During  a  very  severe  winter,  one  of  his  missionaries 
contrived  a  false  floor  to  his  confessional  and  placed  a  metal 
case  of  hot  water  beneath.  The  trick  succeeded,  and  the  Saint 
was  deceived:  'God  is  very  good,'  he  said  with  emotion.  'This 
year,  through  all  the  cold,  my  feet  have  always  been  warm.'  "  ^ 

In  this  case  the  spontaneous  impulse  to  make  sacrifices  for 
the  pure  love  of  God  was  probably  the  uppermost  conscious 
motive.  We  may  class  it,  then,  under  our  head  3.  Some  au^ 
thors  think  that  the  impulse  to  sacrifice  is  the  main  religious 
phenomenon.  It  is  a  prominent,  a  universal  phenomenon 
certainly,  and  lies  deeper  than  any  special  creed.  Here,  for 
instance,  is  what  seems  to  be  a  spontaneous  example  of  it, 
simply  expressing  what  seemed  right  at  the  time  between 
the  individual  and  his  Maker.  Cotton  Mather,  the  New 
England  Puritan  divine,  is  generally  reputed  a  rather  gro- 
tesque pedant;  yet  what  is  more  touchingly  simple  than  his 
relation  of  what  happened  when  his  wife  came  to  die? 

"When  I  saw  to  what  a  point  of  resignation  I  was  now  called 
of  the  Lord,"  he  says,  "I  resolved,  with  his  help,  therein  to 
glorify  him.  So,  two  hours  before  my  lovely  consort  expired,  1 

1  A.  Mounin:  Le  Cure  d'Ars,  Vie  de  M.  J.  B.  M.  Vianney,  1864. 
p.  545,  abridged. 


298       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

kneeled  by  her  bedside,  and  I  took  into  my  two  hands  a  dear 

hand,  the  dearest  in  the  world.  With  her  thus  in  my  hands,  I 

solemnly  and  sincerely  gave  her  up  unto  the  Lord:  and  in  token 

of  my  real  Resignation,  I  gently  put  her  out  of  my  hands,  and 

laid  away  a  most  lovely  hand,  resolving  that  I  would  never 

touch  it  more.  This  was  the  hardest,  and  perhaps  the  bravest 

action  that  ever  I  did.  She  .  .  .  told  me  that  she  signed  and 

sealed  my  act  of  resignation.  And  though  before  that  she  called 

for   me   continually,   she   after   this   never   asked   for   me  anv 

"  1 
more.    ^ 

Father  Vianney's  asceticism  taken  in  its  totality  was  simp- 
ly the  result  of  a  permanent  flood  of  high  spiritual  enthu- 
siasm, longing  to  make  proof  of  itself.  The  Roman  Church 
has,  in  its  incomparable  fashion,  collected  all  the  motives 
towards  asceticism  together,  and  so  codified  them  that  any 
one  wishing  to  pursue  Christian  perfection  may  find  a  prac- 
tical system  mapped  out  for  him  in  any  one  of  a  number 
of  ready-made  manuals.^  The  dominant  Church  notion  of 
perfection  is  of  course  the  negative  one  of  avoidance  of  sin. 
Sin  proceeds  from  concupiscence,  and  concupiscence  from 
our  carnal  passions  and  temptations,  chief  of  which  are 
pride,  sensuality  in  all  its  forms,  and  the  loves  of  worldly  ex- 
citement and  possession.  All  these  sources  of  sin  must  be  re- 
sisted; and  discipline  and  austerities  are  a  most  efficacious 
mode  of  meeting  them.  Hence  there  are  always  in  these 
books  chapters  on  self-mortification.  But  whenever  a  pro- 
cedure is  codified,  the  more  delicate  spirit  of  it  evaporates, 
and  if  we  wish  the  undiluted  ascetic  spirit — the  passion  of 
self-contempt  wreaking  itself  on  the  poor  flesh,  the  divine  ir- 

1  B.  Wendell:  Cotton  Mather,  New  York,  no  date,  p.  198. 

-  That  of  the  earlier  Jesuit,  Rodriguez,  which  has  been  translated 
into  all  languages,  is  one  of  the  best  known.  A  convenient  modern 
manual,  very  well  put  together,  is  L'Ascetique  Chretienne,  by  M.  J. 
RiBET,  Paris,  Poussielguc,  nouvellc  edition,  1898. 


SAINTLINESS  299 

rationality  of  devotion  making  a  sacrificial  gift  of  all  it  has 
(its  sensibilities,  namely)  to  the  object  of  its  adoration — we 
must  go  to  autobiographies,  or  other  individual  documents. 
Saint  John  of  the  Cross,  a  Spanish  mystic  who  flourished 
— or  rather  who  existed,  for  there  was  little  that  suggested 
flourishing  about  him — in  the  sixteenth  century,  will  supply 
a  passage  suitable  for  our  purpose. 

"First  of  all,  carefully  excite  in  yourself  an  habitual  affection- 
ate will  in  all  things  to  imitate  Jesus  Christ.  If  anything  agree- 
able offers  itself  to  your  senses,  yet  does  not  at  the  same  time 
tend  purely  to  the  honor  and  glory  of  God,  renounce  it  and 
separate  yourself  from  it  for  the  love  of  Christ,  who  all  his  life 
long  had  no  other  taste  or  wish  than  to  do  the  will  of  his  Father 
whom  he  called  his  meat  and  nourishment.  For  example,  you 
take  satisfaction  in  hearing  of  things  in  which  the  glory  of  God 
bears  no  part.  Deny  yourself  this  satisfaction,  mortify  your  wish 
to  listen.  You  take  pleasure  in  seeing  objects  which  do  not  raise 
your  mind  to  God:  refuse  yourself  this  pleasure,  and  turn  away 
your  eyes.  The  same  with  conversations  and  all  other  things. 
Act  similarly,  so  far  as  you  are  able,  with  all  the  operations  of 
the  senses,  striving  to  make  yourself  free  from  their  yokes. 

"The  radical  remedy  lies  in  the  mortification  of  the  four  great 
natural  passions,  joy,  hope,  fear,  and  grief.  You  must  seek  to 
deprive  these  of  every  satisfaction  and  leave  them  as  it  were  in 
darkness  and  the  void.  Let  your  soul  therefore  turn  always: 

"Not  to  what  is  most  easy,  but  to  what  is  hardest; 

"Not  to  what  tastes  best,  but  to  what  is  most  distasteful; 

"Not  to  what  most  pleases,  but  to  what  disgusts; 

"Not  to  matter  of  consolation,  but  to  matter  for  desolation 
rather; 

"Not  to  rest,  but  to  labor; 

"Not  to  desire  the  more,  but  the  less; 

"Not  to  aspire  to  what  is  highest  and  most  precious,  but  to 
what  is  lowest  and  most  contemptible; 

"Not  to  will  anything,  but  to  will  nothing; 

"Not  to  seek  the  best  in  everything,  but  to  seek  the  worst,  so 


300       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

that  you  may  enter  for  the  love  of  Christ  into  a  complete  desti- 
tution, a  perfect  poverty  of  spirit,  and  an  absolute  renunciation 
of  everything  in  this  world. 

"Embrace  these  practices  with  all  the  energy  of  your  soul 
and  you  will  find  in  a  short  time  great  delights  and  unspeakable 
consolations. 

'"Despise  yourself,  and  wish  that  others  should  despise  you; 

"Speak  to  your  own  disadvantage,  and  desire  others  to  do  the 
same; 

"Conceive  a  low  opinion  of  yourself,  and  find  it  good  when 
others  hold  the  same; 

"To  enjoy  the  taste  of  all  things,  have  no  taste  for  anything. 

"To  know  all  things,  learn  to  know  nothing. 

"To  possess  all  things,  resolve  to  possess  nothing. 

"To  be  all  things,  be  willing  to  be  nothing. 

"To  get  to  where  you  have  no  taste  for  anything,  go  through 
whatever  experiences  you  have  no  taste  for. 

"To  learn  to  know  nothing,  go  whither  you  are  ignorant. 

"To  reach  what  you  possess  not,  go  whithersoever  you  own 
nothing. 

"To  be  what  you  are  not,  experience  what  you  are  not." 

These  later  verses  play  with  that  vertigo  of  self-contra- 
diction which  is  so  dear  to  mysticism.  Those  that  come  next 
are  completely  mystical,  for  in  them  Saint  John  passes  from 
God  to  the  more  metaphysical  notion  of  the  All. 

"When  you  stop  at  one  thing,  you  cease  to  open  yourself  to 
^.he  All. 

"For  to  come  to  the  All  you  must  give  up  the  All. 

"And  if  you  should  attain  to  owning  the  All,  you  must  own 
)i,  desiring  Nothing. 

"In  this  spoliation,  the  soul  finds  its  tranquillity  and  rest. 
Profoundly  established  in  the  centre  of  its  own  nothingness,  it 
can  be  assailed  by  naught  that  comes  from  below;  and  since  it 
no  longer  desires  anything,  what  comes  from  above  cannot  de- 
press it;  for  its  desires  alone  are  the  causes  of  its  woes."  ^ 

^  Saint  Jean  de  la  Croix,  Vie  et  CEuvres,  Paris,  1893,  ii.  94,  99. 
ibridged. 


SAINTLINESS  3OI 

And  now,  as  a  more  concrete  example  of  heads  4  and  5, 
in  fact  of  all  our  heads  together,  and  of  the  irrational  ex- 
treme to  which  a  psychopathic  individual  may  go  in  the  line 
of  bodily  austerity,  I  will  quote  the  sincere  Suso's  account 
of  his  own  self-tortures.  Suso,  you  will  remember,  was  one 
of  the  fourteenth  century  German  mystics;  his  autobiog- 
raphy, written  in  the  third  person,  is  a  classic  religious  doc- 
ument. 

"He  was  in  his  youth  of  a  temperament  full  of  fire  and  life; 
and  when  this  began  to  make  itself  felt,  it  was  very  grievous  to 
him;  and  he  sought  by  many  devices  how  he  might  bring  his 
body  into  subjection.  He  wore  for  a  long  time  a  "lair  shirt  and 
an  iron  chain,  until  the  blood  ran  from  him,  so  that  he  was 
obliged  to  leave  them  off.  He  secretly  caused  an  undergarment 
to  be  made  for  him;  and  in  the  undergarment  he  had  strips  of 
leather  fixed,  into  which  a  hundred  and  fifty  brass  nails,  pointed 
and  filed  sharp,  were  driven,  and  the  points  of  the  nails  were  al- 
ways turned  towards  the  flesh.  He  had  this  garment  made  very 
tight,  and  so  arranged  as  to  go  round  him  and  fasten  in  front, 
in  order  that  it  might  fit  the  closer  to  his  body,  and  the  pointed 
nails  might  be  driven  into  his  flesh;  and  it  wa«  high  enough  to 
reach  upwards  to  his  navel.  In  this  he  used  to  sleep  at  night. 
Now  in  summer,  when  it  was  hot,  and  he  was  very  tired  and  ill 
from  his  journeyings,  or  when  he  held  the  office  of  lecturer,  he 
would  sometimes,  as  he  lay  thus  in  bonds,  and  oppressed  with 
toil,  and  tormented  also  by  noxious  insects,  cry  aloud  and  give 
way  to  fretfulness,  and  twist  round  and  round  in  agony,  as  a 
worm  does  when  run  through  with  a  pointed  needle.  It  often 
seemed  to  him  as  if  he  were  lying  upon  an  ant-hill,  from  the 
torture  caused  by  the  insects;  for  if  he  wished  to  sleep,  or  when 
he  had  fallen  asleep,  they  vied  with  one  another.^  Sometimes  he 

^  "Insects,"  i.e.  lice,  were  an  unfailing  token  of  mediaeval  sainthood. 
Wc  read  of  Francis  of  Assisi's  sheepskin  that  "often  a  companion  ol 
the  saint  would  take  it  to  the  fire  to  clean  and  dispediculate  it,  doing 
so,  as  he  said,  because  the  seraphic  father  himself  was  no  enemy  of 
pedoechi,  but  on  the  contrary  kept  them  on  him  (le  portava  adosso), 
and  held  it  for  an  honor  and  a  glory  to  wear  these  celestial  pearls  in 


302       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

cried  to  Almighty  God  in  the  fullness  of  his  heart:  Alas!  Gentle 
God,  what  a  dying  is  this!  When  a  man  is  killed  by  murderers 
er  strong  beasts  of  prey  it  is  soon  over;  but  I  lie  dying  here  under 
the  cruel  insects,  and  yet  cannot  die.  The  nights  in  winter  were 
never  so  long,  nor  was  the  summer  so  hot,  as  to  make  him  leave 
ofif  this  exercise.  On  the  contrary,  he  devised  something  farther 
— two  leathern  loops  into  which  he  put  his  hands,  and  fastened 
one  on  each  side  his  throat,  and  made  the  fastenings  so  secure 
that  even  if  his  cell  had  been  on  fire  about  him.  he  could  not 
have  helped  himself.  This  he  continued  until  his  hands  and 
arms  had  become  almost  tremulous  with  the  strain,  and  then 
he  devised  something  else:  two  leather  gloves;  and  he  caused  a 
brazier  to  fit  them  all  over  with  sharp-pointed  brass  tacks,  and 
he  used  to  put  them  on  at  night,  in  order  that  if  he  should  try 
while  asleep  to  throw  off  the  hair  undergarment,  or  relieve  him- 
self from  the  gnawings  of  the  vile  insects,  the  tacks  might  then 
stick  into  his  body.  And  so  it  came  to  pass.  If  ever  he  sought  to 
help  himself  with  his  hands  in  his  sleep,  he  drove  the  sharp 
tacks  into  his  breast,  and  tore  himself,  so  that  his  flesh  festered. 
When  after  many  weeks  the  wounds  had  healed,  he  tore  him- 
self again  and  made  fresh  wounds. 

"He  continued  this  tormenting  exercise  for  about  sixteen 
years.  At  the  end  of  this  time,  when  his  blood  was  now  chilled, 
and  the  fire  of  his  temperament  destroyed,  there  appeared  to 
him  in  a  vision  on  Whitsunday,  a  messenger  from  heaven,  who 
told  him  that  God  required  this  of  him  no  longer.  Whereupon 
he  discontinued  it,  and  threw  all  these  things  away  into  a  run- 


nmg  stream 


Suso  then  tells  how,  to  emulate  the  sorrows  of  his  crucified 
Lord,  he  made  himself  a  cross  with  thirty  protruding  iron 
needles  and  nails.  This  he  bore  on  his  bare  back  between  his 
shoulders  day  and  night.  "The  first  time  that  he  stretched  out 
this  cross  upon  his  back  his  tender  frame  was  struck  with  terror 
at  it,  and  blunted  the  sharp  nails  slighdy  against  a  stone.  But 
soon,' repenting  of  this  womanly  cowardice,  he  pointed  them  all 
again  with  a  file,  and  placed  once  more  the  cross  upon  him.  It 

his  habit."  Quoted  by  P.  Sabatier:  Speculum  Perfectionis,  etc.,  Paris, 
1898,  p.  231,  note. 


SAINTLINESS  303 

made  his  back,  where  the  bones  are,  bloody  and  seared.  When- 
ever he  sat  down  or  stood  up,  it  was  as  if  a  hedgehog-skin  were 
on  him.  If  any  one  touched  him  unawares,  or  pushed  against 
his  clothes,  it  tore  him." 

Suso  next  tells  of  his  penitences  by  means  of  striking  this  cross 
and  forcing  the  nails  deeper  into  the  flesh,  and  likewise  of  his 
self-scourgings — a  dreadful  story — and  then  goes  on  as  follows: 
"At  this  same  period  the  Servitor  procured  an  old  castawa} 
door,  and  he  used  to  lie  upon  it  at  night  without  any  bedclothes 
to  make  him  comfortable,  except  that  he  took  off  his  shoes  and 
wrapped  a  thick  cloak  round  him.  He  thus  secured  for  himself 
a  most  miserable  bed;  for  hard  pea-stalks  lay  in  humps  under 
his  head,  the  cross  with  the  sharp  nails  stuck  into  his  back,  his 
arms  were  locked  fast  in  bonds,  the  horsehair  undergarment  was 
round  his  loins,  and  the  cloak  too  was  heavy  and  the  door  hard. 
Thus  he  lay  in  wretchedness,  afraid  to  stir,  just  like  a  log,  and 
he  would  send  up  many  a  sigh  to  God. 

"In  winter  he  suffered  very  much  from  the  frost.  If  he 
stretched  out  his  feet  they  lay  bare  on  the  floor  and  froze,  if  he 
gathered  them  up  the  blood  became  all  on  fire  in  his  legs,  and 
this  was  great  pain.  His  feet  were  full  of  sores,  his  legs  dropsical, 
his  knees  bloody  and  seared,  his  loins  covered  with  scars  from 
the  horsehair,  his  body  wasted,  his  mouth  parched  with  intense 
thirst,  and  his  hands  tremulous  from  weakness.  Amid  these 
torments  he  spent  his  nights  and  days;  and  he  endured  them  all 
out  of  the  greatness  of  the  love  which  he  bore  in  his  heart  to  the 
Divine  and  Eternal  Wisdom,  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  whose 
agonizing  sufferings  he  sought  to  imitate.  After  a  time  he  gave 
up  this  penitential  exercise  of  the  door,  and  instead  of  it  he 
took  up  his  abode  in  a  very  small  cell,  and  used  the  bench,  which 
was  so  narrow  and  short  that  he  could  not  stretch  himself  upon 
it,  as  his  bed.  In  this  hole,  or  upon  the  door,  he  lay  at  night  in 
his  usual  bonds,  for  about  eight  years.  It  was  also  his  custom, 
during  the  space  of  twenty-five  years,  provided  he  was  staying 
in  the  convent,  never  to  go  after  compline  in  winter  into  any 
warm  room,  or  to  the  convent  stove  to  warm  himself,  no  matter 
how  cold  it  might  be,  unless  he  was  obliged  to  do  so  for  other 
reasons.  Throughout  all  these  years  he  never  took  a  bath,  either 
2  water  or  a  sweating  bath;  and  this  he  did  in  order  to  mortify 


304       THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

his  comfort-seeking  body.  He  practiced  during  a  long  time  such 
rigid  poverty  that  he  would  neither  receive  nor  touch  a  penny, 
either  with  leave  or  without  it.  For  a  considerable  time  he  strove 
to  attain  such  a  high  degree  of  purity  that  he  would  neither  | 

scratch  nor  touch  any  part  of  his  body,  save  only  his  hands  and 
feet."  1 

I  spare  you  the  recital  of  poor  Suso's  self-inflicted  tortures 
from  thirst.  It  is  pleasant  to  know  that  after  his  fortieth 
year,  God  showed  him  by  a  series  of  visions  that  he  had  suf- 
ficiently broken  down  the  natural  man,  and  that  he  might 
leave  these  exercises  off.  His  case  is  distinctly  pathological, 
but  he  does  not  seem  to  have  had  the  alleviation,  which 
some  ascetics  have  enjoyed,  of  an  alteration  of  sensibility 
capable  of  actually  turning  torment  into  a  perverse  kind  of 
pleasure.  Of  the  founder  of  the  Sacred  Heart  order,  for  ex-  M 
ample,  we  read  that  ■ 

"Her  love  of  pain  and  suffering  was  insatiable.  .  .  .  She 
said  that  she  could  cheerfully  live  till  the  day  of  judgment,  pro- 
vided she  might  always  have  matter  for  suffering  for  God;  but 
that  to  live  a  single  day  without  suffering  would  be  intolerable. 
She  said  again  that  she  was  devoured  with  two  unassuageable 
fevers,  one  for  the  holy  communion,  the  other  for  suffering,  hu- 
miliation, and  annihilation.  'Nothing  but  pain,'  she  continually 
said  in  her  letters,  'makes  my  life  supportable.'  "  - 

So  much  for  the  phenomena  to  which  the  ascetic  impulse 
will  m  certain  persons  give  rise.  In  the  ecclesiastically  conse- 
crated character  three  minor  branches  of  self-mortification 
have  been  recognized  as  indispensable  pathways  to  perfec- 
tion. I  refer  to  the  chastity,  obedience,  and  poverty  which  the 
monk  vows  to  observe;  and  upon  the  heads  of  obedience 
and  poverty  I  will  make  a  few  remarks. 

1  The  Life  of  the  Blessed  Henry  Suso,  by  Himself,  translated  by 
T.  F.  Knox,  London,  1865,  pp.  56-80,  abridged. 

2  Bougaud:  Hist,  de  la  bienheureuse  Marguerite  Marie,  Paris,  1894. 
pp.  265,  171.  Compare,  also,  pp.  386,  387. 


SAINTLINESS  3O5 

First,  of  Obedience.  The  secular  life  of  our  twentieth  cen- 
tury opens  with  this  virtue  held  in  no  high  esteem.  The  duty 
of  the  individual  to  determine  his  own  conduct  and  profit 
or  suffer  by  the  consequences  seems,  on  the  contrary,  to  be 
one  of  our  best  rooted  contemporary  Protestant  social  ideals. 
So  much  so  that  it  is  difficult  even  imaginatively  to  com- 
prehend how  men  possessed  of  an  inner  life  of  their  own 
could  ever  have  come  to  think  the  subjection  of  its  will  to 
that  of  other  finite  creatures  recommendable.  I  confess  that 
to  myself  it  seems  something  of  a  mystery.  Yet  it  evident- 
ly corresponds  to  a  profound  interior  need  of  many  persons, 
and  we  must  do  our  best  to  understand  it. 

On  the  lowest  possible  plane,  one  sees  how  the  expediency 
of  obedience  in  a  firm  ecclesiastical  organization  must  have 
led  to  its  being  viewed  as  meritorious.  Next,  experience 
shows  that  there  are  times  in  every  one's  life  when  one  can 
be  better  counseled  by  others  than  by  one's  self.  Inability  to 
decide  is  one  of  the  commonest  symptoms  of  fatigued 
nerves;  friends  who  see  our  troubles  more  broadly,  often  see 
them  more  wisely  than  we  do;  so  it  is  frequently  an  act  of 
excellent  virtue  to  consult  and  obey  a  doctor,  a  partner,  or 
a  wife.  But,  leaving  these  lower  prudential  regions,  we  find, 
in  the  nature  of  some  of  the  spiritual  excitements  which  we 
have  been  studying,  good  reasons  for  idealizing  obedience. 
Obedience  may  spring  from  the  general  religious  phenom- 
enon of  inner  softening  and  self-surrender  and  throwing 
one's  self  on  higher  powers.  So  saving  are  these  attitudes  felt 
to  be  that  in  themselves,  apart  from  utility,  they  become 
ideally  consecrated;  and  in  obeying  a  man  whose  fallibility 
we  see  through  thoroughly,  we,  nevertheless,  may  feel  much 
as  we  do  when  we  resign  our  will  to  that  of  infinite  wisdom. 
Add  self-despair  and  the  passion  of  self-crucifixion  to  this, 
and  obedience  becomes  an  ascetic  sacrifice,  agreeable  quite 
irrespective  of  whatever  prudential  uses  it  might  have. 

It  is  as  a  sacrifice,  a  mode  of  "mortification,"  that  obc- 


306       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

dience  is  primarily  conceived  by  Catholic  writers,  a  "sacrifice 
which  man  offers  to  God,  and  of  which  he  is  himself  both 
the  priest  and  the  victim.  By  poverty  he  immolates  his  ex- 
terior possessions;  by  chastity  he  immolates  his  body;  by 
obedience  he  completes  the  sacrifice,  and  gives  to  God  all  that 
he  yet  holds  as  his  own,  his  two  most  precious  goods,  his  in- 
tellect and  his  will.  The  sacrifice  is  then  complete  and  unre- 
served, a  genuine  holocaust,  for  the  entire  victim  is  now  con- 
sumed for  the  honor  of  God."  ^  Accordingly,  in  Catholic  dis- 
cipline, we  obey  our  superior  not  as  mere  man,  but  as  the 
representative  of  Christ.  Obeying  God  in  him  by  our  inten- 
tion, obedience  is  easy.  But  when  the  text-book  theologians 
marshal  collectively  all  their  reasons  for  recommending  it, 
the  mixture  sounds  to  our  ears  rather  odd. 

"One  of  the  great  consolations  of  the  monastic  life,"  says  a 
Jesuit  authority,  "is  the  assurance  we  have  that  in  obeying  we 
can  commit  no  fault.  The  Superior  may  commit  a  fault  in  com- 
manding you  to  do  this  thing  or  that,  but  you  are  certain  that 
you  commit  no  fault  so  long  as  you  obey,  because  God  will  only 
ask  you  if  you  have  duly  performed  what  orders  you  received, 
and  if  you  can  furnish  a  clear  account  in  that  respect,  you  are 
absolved  entirely.  Whether  the  things  you  did  were  opportune, 
or  whether  there  were  not  something  better  that  might  have 
been  done,  these  are  questions  not  asked  of  you,  but  rather  of 
your  Superior.  The  moment  what  you  did  was  done  obediently, 
God  wipes  it  out  of  your  account,  and  charges  it  to  the  Superior. 
So  that  Saint  Jerome  well  exclaimed,  in  celebrating  the  advan- 
tages of  obedience,  'Oh,  sovereign  liberty!  Oh,  holy  and  blessed 
security  by  which  one  become  almost  impeccable!' 

"Saint  John  Climachus  is  of  the  same  sentiment  when  he  calls 
obedience  an  excuse  before  God.  In  fact,  when  God  asks  why 
you  have  done  this  or  that,  and  you  reply,  it  is  because  I  was  so 
opdered  by  my  Superiors,  God  will  ask  for  no  other  excuse.  As 
a  passenger  in  a  good  vessel  with  a  good  pilot  need  give  himself 

1  Lejuene:  Introduction  a  la  Vie  Mystique,  1899,  p.  277.  The  holo- 
caust simile  goes  back  at  least  as  far  as  Ignatius  Loyola. 


SAINTLINESS  307 

no  farther  concern,  but  may  go  to  sleep  in  peace,  because  the 
pilot  has  charge  over  all,  and  'watches  for  him';  so  a  religious 
person  who  lives  under  the  yoke  of  obedience  goes  to  heaven  as 
if  while  sleeping,  that  is,  while  leaning  entirely  on  the  conduct 
of  his  Superiors,  who  are  the  pilots  of  his  vessel,  and  keep  watch 
for  him  continually.  It  is  no  small  thing,  of  a  truth,  to  be  able 
to  cross  the  stormy  sea  of  life  on  the  shoulders  and  in  the  arms 
of  another,  yet  that  is  just  the  grace  which  God  accords  to  those 
who  live  under  the  yoke  of  obedience.  Their  Superior  bears  all 
their  burdens.  ...  A  certain  grave  doctor  said  that  he  would 
rather  spend  his  life  in  picking  up  straws  by  obedience,  than  by 
his  own  responsible  choice  busy  himself  with  the  loftiest  work;^ 
of  charity,  because  one  is  certain  of  following  the  will  of  Goc. 
in  whatever  one  may  do  from  obedience,  but  never  certain  in 
the  same  degree  of  anything  which  we  may  do  of  our  own 
proper  movement."  ^ 

One  should  read  the  letters  in  which  Ignatius  Loyola  rec- 
ommends obedience  as  the  backbone  of  his  order,  if  one 
would  gain  insight  into  the  full  spirit  of  its  cult."  They  are 
too  long  to  quote;  but  Ignatius's  belief  is  so  vividly  expressed 
in  a  couple  of  sayings  reported  by  companions  that,  though 
they  have  been  so  often  cited,  I  will  ask  your  permission  to 
copy  them  once  more: — 

"I  ought,"  an  early  biographer  reports  him  as  saying,  "on  en- 
tering religion,  and  thereafter,  to  place  myself  entirely  in  the 
hands  of  God,  and  of  him  who  takes  His  place  by  His  authority. 
I  ought  to  desire  that  my  Superior  should  oblige  me  to  give  up 
my  own  judgment,  and  conquer  my  own  mind.  I  ought  to  set 
up  no  difference  between  one  Superior  and  another,  .  .  .  bur 
recognize  them  all  as  equal  before  God,  whose  place  they  fill 
For  if  I  distinguish  persons,  I  weaken  the  spirit  of  obedience. 
In  the  hands  of  my  Superior,  I  must  be  a  soft  wax,  a  thing,  from 

1  Alfonso  Rodriguez,  S.  J.:  Pratique  de  la  Perfection  Chretienne 
Part  iii..  Treatise  v.,  ch.  x. 

2  Letters  li.  and  cxx.  of  the  collection  translated  into  French  by 
Bouix,  Paris,  1870. 


308       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

which  he  is  to  require  whatever  pleases  him,  be  it  to  write  or 
receive  letters,  to  speak  or  not  to  speak  to  such  a  person,  or  the 
like;  and  I  must  put  all  my  fervor  in  executing  zealously  and 
exactly  what  I  am  ordered.  I  must  consider  myself  as  a  corpse 
which  has  neither  intelligence  nor  will;  be  like  a  mass  of  matter 
which  without  resistance  lets  itself  be  placed  wherever  it  may 
please  any  one;  like  a  stick  in  the  hand  of  an  old  man,  who  uses 
it  according  to  his  needs  and  places  it  where  it  suits  him.  So 
must  I  be  under  the  hands  of  the  Order,  to  serve  it  in  the  way 
it  judges  most  useful. 

"I  must  never  ask  of  the  Superior  to  be  sent  to  a  particular 
place,  to  be  employed  in  a  particular  duty.  ...  I  must  consid- 
er nothing  as  belonging  to  me  personally,  and  as  regards  the 
things  I  use,  be  like  a  statue  which  lets  itself  be  stripped  and 
never  opposes  resistance."  ^ 

The  other  saying  is  reported  by  Rodriguez  in  the  chapter 
from  which  I  a  moment  ago  made  quotations.  When  speak- 
ing of  the  Pope's  authority,  Rodriguez  writes: — 

"Saint  Ignatius  said,  when  general  of  his  company,  that  if 
the  Holy  Father  were  to  order  him  to  set  sail  in  the  first  bark 
which  he  might  find  in  the  port  of  Ostia,  near  Rome,  and  to 
abandon  himself  to  the  sea,  without  a  mast,  without  sails,  with- 
out oars  or  rudder  or  any  of  the  things  that  are  needful  for 
navigation  or  subsistence,  he  would  obey  not  only  with  alacrity, 
but  without  anxiety  or  repugnance,  and  even  with  a  great  in- 
ternal satisfaction."  ^ 

With  a  solitary  concrete  example  of  the  extravagance  to 
which  the  virtue  we  are  considering  has  been  carried,  I  will 
pass  to  the  topic  next  in  order. 

"Sister  Marie  Claire  [of  Port  Royal]  had  been  greatly  imbued 
with  the  holiness  and  excellence  of  M.  de  Langres.  This  prelate, 
soon  after  he  came  to  Port  Royal,  said  to  her  one  day,  seeing  her 

^  Bartoli-Michel,  ii.  13. 

^  Rodriguez:  Op.  cit.,  Part  iii.,  Treatise  v.,  ch.  vi. 


SAINTLINESS  309 

SO  tenderly  attached  to  Mother  Angelique,  that  it  would  per- 
haps be  better  not  to  speak  to  her  again.  Marie  Claire,  greedy  of 
obedience,  took  this  inconsiderate  word  for  an  oracle  of  God, 
and  from  that  day  forward  remained  for  several  years  without 
once  speaking  to  her  sister."  ^ 

Our  next  topic  shall  be  Poverty,  felt  at  all  times  and  under 
all  creeds  as  one  adornment  of  a  saintly  life.  Since  the  in- 
stinct of  ownership  is  fundamental  in  man's  nature,  this  is 
one  more  example  of  the  ascetic  paradox.  Yet  it  appears  no 
paradox  at  all,  but  perfectly  reasonable,  the  moment  one  rec- 
ollects how  easily  higher  excitements  hold  lower  cupidities 
in  check.  Having  just  quoted  the  Jesuit  Rodriguez  on  the 
subject  of  obedience,  I  will,  to  give  immediately  a  concrete 
turn  to  our  discussion  of  poverty,  also  read  you  a  page  from 
his  chapter  on  this  latter  virtue.  You  must  remember  that  he 
is  writing  instructions  for  monks  of  his  own  order,  and 
bases  them  all  on  the  text,  "Blessed  are  the  poor  in  spirit." 

"If  any  one  of  you,"  he  says,  "will  know  whether  or  not  he  is 
really  poor  in  spirit,  let  him  consider  whether  he  loves  the  ordi- 
nary consequences  and  effects  of  poverty,  which  are  hunger, 
thirst,  cold,  fatigue,  and  the  denudation  of  all  conveniences. 
See  if  you  are  glad  to  wear  a  worn-out  habit  full  of  patches.  Sec 
if  you  are  glad  v/hen  something  is  lacking  to  your  meal,  when 
you  are  passed  by  in  serving  it,  when  what  you  receive  is  dis- 
tasteful to  you,  when  your  cell  is  out  of  repair.  If  you  are  not 
glad  of  these  things,  if  instead  of  loving  them  you  avoid  them, 
then  there  is  proof  that  you  have  not  attained  the  perfection  of 
poverty  of  spirit."  Rodriguez  then  goes  on  to  describe  the  prac- 
tice of  poverty  in  more  detail.  "The  first  point  is  that  which 
Saint  Ignatius  proposes  in  his  constitutions,  when  he  says,  'Let 
no  one  use  anything  as  if  it  were  his  private  possession.'  'A  re- 
ligious person,'  he  says,  'ought  in  respect  to  all  the  things  that 
he  uses,  to  be  like  a  statue  which  one  may  drape  with  clothing, 
but  which  feels  no  grief  and  makes  no  resistance  when  one  strips 

^  Sainte-Beuve:  Histoirc  de  Port  Royal,  i.  346. 


310      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

it  again.  It  is  in  this  way  that  you  should  feel  towards  your 
clothes,  your  books,  your  cell,  and  everything  else  that  you  make 
use  of;  if  ordered  to  quit  them,  or  to  exchange  them  for  others, 
have  no  more  sorrow  than  if  you  were  a  statue  being  uncovered. 
In  this  way  you  will  avoid  using  them  as  if  they  were  your  pri- 
vate possession.  But  if,  when  you  give  up  your  cell,  or  yield  pos- 
session of  this  or  that  object  or  exchange  it  for  another,  you  feel 
repugnance  and  are  not  like  a  statue,  that  shows  that  you  view 
these  things  as  if  they  were  your  private  property.' 

"And  this  is  why  our  holy  founder  wished  the  superiors  tp 
test  their  monks  somewhat  as  God  tested  Abraham,  and  to  put 
their  poverty  and  their  obedience  to  trial,  that  by  this  means 
they  may  become  acquainted  with  the  degree  of  their  virtue, 
and  gain  a  chance  to  make  ever  farther  progress  in  perfection, 
.  .  .  making  the  one  move  out  of  his  room  when  he  finds  it 
comfortable  and  is  attached  to  it;  taking  away  from  another  a 
book  of  which  he  is  fond;  or  obliging  a  third  to  exchange  his 
garment  for  a  worse  one.  Otherwise  we  should  end  by  acquir- 
ing a  species  of  property  in  all  these  several  objects,  and  little 
by  little  the  wall  of  poverty  that  surrounds  us  and  constitutes 
our  principal  defense  would  be  thrown  down.  The  ancient 
fathers  of  the  desert  used  often  thus  to  treat  their  companions. 
.  .  .  Saint  Dositheus,  being  sick-nurse,  desired  a  certain  knife, 
and  asked  Saint  Dorotheus  for  it,  not  for  his  private  use,  but 
for  employment  in  the  infirmary  of  which  he  had  charge. 
Whereupon  Saint  Dorotheus  answered  him:  'Ha!  Dositheus,  so 
that  knife  pleases  you  so  much!  Will  you  be  the  slave  of  a  knife 
or  the  slave  of  Jesus  Christ!  Do  you  not  blush  with  shame  at 
wishing  that  a  knife  should  be  your  master?  I  will  not  let  you 
touch  it.'  Which  reproach  and  refusal  had  such  an  eflect  upon 
the  holy  disciple  that  since  that  time  he  never  touched  the  knife 
again.'  .  .  . 

"Therefore,  in  our  rooms,"  Father  Rodriguez  continues, 
"there  must  be  no  other  furniture  than  a  bed,  a  table,  a  bench, 
and  a  candlestick,  things  purely  necessary,  and  nothing  more.  It 
is  not  allowed  among  us  that  our  cells  should  be  ornamented 
with  pictures  or  aught  else,  neither  armchairs,  carpets,  curtains, 
nor  any  sort  of  cabinet  or  bureau  of  any  elegance.  Neither  is  it 
allowed  us  to  keep  anything  to  eat,  either  for  ourselves  or  for 


SAINTLINESS  3II 

those  who  may  come  to  visit  us.  We  must  ask  permission  to  go 
to  the  refectory  even  for  a  glass  of  water;  and  finally  we  may 
not  keep  a  book  in  which  we  can  write  a  line,  or  which  we  may 
take  away  with  us.  One  cannot  deny  that  thus  we  are  in  great 
poverty.  But  this  poverty  is  at  the  same  time  a  great  repose  and 
a  great  perfection.  For  it  would  be  inevitable,  in  case  a  religious 
person  were  allowed  to  own  superfluous  possessions,  that  these 
things  would  greatly  occupy  his  mind,  be  it  to  acquire  them,  to 
preserve  them,  or  to  increase  them;  so  that  in  not  permitting  us 
at  all  to  own  them,  all  these  inconveniences  are  remedied. 
Among  the  various  good  reasons  why  the  company  forbids 
secular  persons  to  enter  our  cells,  the  principal  one  is  that  thus 
we  may  the  easier  be  kept  in  poverty.  After  all,  we  are  all  men. 
and  if  we  were  to  receive  people  of  the  world  into  our  rooms, 
we  should  not  have  the  strength  to  remain  within  the  bounds 
prescribed,  but  should  at  least  wish  to  adorn  them  with  some 
books  to  give  the  visitors  a  better  opinion  of  our  scholarship."  ^ 

• 

Since  Hindu  fakirs,  Buddhist  monks,  and  Mohammedan 
dervishes  unite  with  Jesuits  and  Franciscans  in  idealizing 
poverty  as  the  loftiest  individual  state,  it  is  worth  while  to 
examine  into  the  spiritual  grounds  for  such  a  seemingly  un- 
natural opinion.  And  first,  of  those  which  lie  closest  to 
common  human  nature. 

The  opposition  between  the  men  who  have  and  the  men 
who  are  is  immemorial.  Though  the  gentleman,  in  the  old- 
fashioned  sense  of  the  man  who  is  well  born,  has  usually  in 
point  of  fact  been  predaceous  and  reveled  in  lands  and 
goods,  yet  he  has  never  identified  his  essence  with  these  pos- 
sessions, but  rather  with  the  personal  superiorities,  the  cour- 
age, generosity,  and  pride  supposed  to  be  his  birthright.  To 
certain  huckstering  kinds  of  consideration  he  thanked  God 
he  was  forever  inaccessible,  and  if  in  life's  vicissitudes  he 
should  become  destitute  through  their  lack,  he  was  glad  to 
think  that  with  his  sheer  valor  he  was  all  the  freer  to  work 

^  Rodriguez:  Op.  cit.,  Part  iii,  Treatise  iii.,  chaps,  vi.,  vii. 


312      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

out  his  salvation.  "Wer  nur  selbst  was  hatte,"  says  Lessing's 
I  Tempelherr,  in  Nathan  the  Wise,  "mein  Gott,  mein  Gott, 
ich  habe  nichts!"  This  ideal  of  the  well-born  man  without 
possessions  was  embodied  in  knight-errantry  and  templar- 
Jom;  and,  hideously  corrupted  as  it  has  always  been,  it  still 
dominates  sentimentally,  if  not  practically,  the  military  and 
aristocratic  view  of  life.  We  glorify  the  soldier  as  the  man 
Absolutely  unincumbered.  Owning  nothing  but  his  bare  life, 
and  willing  to  toss  that  up  at  any  moment  when  the  cause 
commands  him,  he  is  the  representative  of  unhampered  free- 
dom in  ideal  directions.  The  laborer  who  pays  with  his  per- 
son day  by  day,  and  has  no  rights  invested  in  the  future,  of- 
fers also  much  of  this  ideal  detachment.  Like  the  savage,  he 
may  make  his  bed  wherever  his  right  arm  can  support  him, 
and  from  his  simple  and  athletic  attitude  of  observation,  the 
property-owner  seems  buried  and  smothered  in  ignoble  ex- 
ternalities and  trammels,  "wading  in  straw  and  rubbish  to 
his  knees."  The  claims  which  things  m.ake  are  corrupters 
of  manhood,  mortgages  on  the  soul,  and  a  drag  anchor  on 
our  progress  towards  the  empyrean. 

"Everything  I  meet  with,"  writes  Whitefield,  "seems  to  carry 
this  voice  with  it — 'Go  thou  and  preach  the  Gospel;  be  a  pil- 
grim on  earth;  have  no  party  or  certain  dwelling  place.'  My 
heart  echoes  back,  'Lord  Jesus,  help  me  to  do  or  suffer  thy  will. 
When  thou  seest  me  in  danger  of  nestling — in  pity — in  tender 
pity — put  a  thorn  in  my  nest  to  prevent  me  from  it.'  "  ^ 

The  loathing  of  "capital"  with  which  our  laboring  classes 
today  are  growing  more  and  more  infected  seems  largely 
composed  of  this  sound  sentiment  of  antipathy  for  lives 
based  on  mere  having.  As  an  anarchist  poet  writes: — 

"Not  by  accumulating  riches,  but  by  giving  away  that  which 
you  have, 

1  R.  Philip:  The  Life  and  Times  of  George  Whitefield,  London, 
1842,  p.  366. 


SAINTLINESS  313 

"Shall  you  become  beautiful; 

"You  must  undo  the  wrappings,  not  case  yourself  in  fresh 
ones; 

"Not  by  multiplying  clothes  shall  you  make  your  body  sound 
and  healthy,  but  rather  by  discarding  them  .  .  . 

"For  a  soldier  who  is  going  on  a  campaign  does  not  seek  what 
fresh  furniture  he  can  carry  on  his  back,  but  rather  what  he  can 
leave  behind;. 

"Knowing  well  that  every  additional  thing  which  he  cannot 
freely  use  and  handle  is  an  impediment."  ^ 

In  short,  lives  based  on  having  are  less  free  than  lives 
based  either  on  doing  or  on  being,  and  in  the  interest  of 
action  people  subject  to  spiritual  excitement  throw  away 
possessions  as  so  many  clogs.  Only  those  who  have  nc 
private  interests  can  follow  an  ideal  straight  away.  Sloth 
and  cowardice  creep  in  with  every  dollar  or  guinea  we  have 
to  guard.  When  a  brother  novice  came  to  Saint  Francis, 
saying:  "Father,  it  would  be  a  great  consolation  to  me  to 
own  a  psalter,  but  even  supposing  that  our  general  should 
concede  to  me  this  indulgence,  still  I  should  like  also  to 
have  your  consent,"  Francis  put  him  off  with  the  examples 
of  Charlemagne,  Roland,  and  Oliver,  pursuing  the  infidels 
in  sweat  and  labor,  and  finally  dying  on  the  field  of  battle. 
"So  care  not,"  he  said,  "for  owning  books  and  knowledge, 
but  care  rather  for  works  of  goodness."  And  when  some 
weeks  later  the  novice  came  again  to  talk  of  his  craving  for 
the  psalter,  Francis  said:  "After  you  have  got  your  psalter 
you  will  crave  a  breviary;  and  after  you  have  got  your 
ijreviary  you  will  sit  in  your  stall  like  a  grand  prelate,  and 
will  say  to  your  brother:  "Hand  me  my  breviary."  .  .  . 
And  thenceforward  he  denied  all  such  requests,  saying:  A 
man  possesses  of  learning  only  so  much  as  comes  out  of 
him  in  action,  and  a  monk  is  a  good  preacher  only  so  far  aR 

1  Edward  Carpenter:  Towards  Democracy,  p.  362,  abridged. 


314       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

his  deeds  proclaim  him  such,  for  every  tree  is  known  by  its 

fruits."  ^ 

But  beyond  this  more  worthily  athletic  attitude  involved 
■,n  doing  and  being,  there  is,  in  the  desire  of  not  having, 
something  profounder  still,  something  related  to  that  funda- 
mental mystery  of  religious  experience,  the  satisfaction  found 
in  absolute  surrender  to  the  larger  power.  So  long  as  any  sec- 
ular safeguard  is  retained,  so  long  as  any  residual  prudential 
guarantee  is  clung  to,  so  long  the  surrender  is  incomplete,  the 
vital  crisis  is  not  passed,  fear  still  stands  sentinel,  and  mis- 
trust of  the  divine  obtains:  we  hold  by  two  anchors,  looking 
to  God,  it  is  true,  after  a  fashion,  but  also  holding  by  our  prop- 
er machinations.  In  certain  medical  experiences  we  have  the 
same  critical  point  to  overcome.  A  drunkard,  or  a  morphine 
or  cocaine  maniac,  offers  himself  to  be  cured.  He  appeals  to 
the  doctor  to  wean  him  from  his  enemy,  but  he  dares  not 
face  blank  abstinence.  The  tyrannical  drug  is  still  an  anchor 
to  windward:  he  hides  supplies  of  it  among  his  clothing; 
arranges  secretly  to  have  it  smuggled  in  in  case  of  need. 
Even  so  an  incompletely  regenerate  man  still  trusts  in  his 
own  expedients.  His  money  is  like  the  sleeping  potion  which 
the  chronically  wakeful  patient  keeps  beside  his  bed;  he 
throws  himself  on  God,  but  //  he  should  need  the  other  help, 
there  it  will  be  also.  Every  one  knows  cases  of  this  incom- 
plete and  ineffective  desire  for  reform— drunkards  whom, 
with  all  their  self-reproaches  and  resolves,  one  perceives  to 
be  quite  unwilling  seriously   to  contemplate   never  being 
drunk  again!  Really  to  give  up  anything  on  which  we  have 
relied,  to  give  it  up  definitely,  "for  good  and  all"  and  for- 
ever, signifies  one  of  those  radical  alterations  of  character 
which  came  under  our  notice  in  the  lectures  on  conversion. 
In  it  the  inner  man  rolls  over  into  an  entirely  different  posi- 
tion of  equilibrium,  lives  in  a  new  centre  of  energy  from 

1  Speculum  Perfectionis,  ed.  P.  Sabatier,  Paris,  1898,  pp.  10,  13. 


SAINTLINESS  315 

this  time  on,  and  the  turning-point  and  hinge  of  all  such 
operations  seems  usually  to  involve  the  sincere  acceptance 
of  certain  nakednesses  and  destitutions. 

Accordingly,  throughout  the  annals  of  the  saintly  life, 
we  find  this  ever-recurring  note:  Fling  yourself  upon 
God's  providence  without  making  any  reserve  whatever — 
take  no  thought  for  the  morrow— sell  all  you  have  and  give 
it  to  the  poor — only  when  the  sacrifice  is  ruthless  and  reck- 
less will  the  higher  safety  really  arrive.  As  a  concrete  exam- 
ple let  me  read  a  page  from  the  biography  of  Antoinette 
Bourignon,  a  good  woman,  much  persecuted  in  her  day  by 
both  Protestants  and  Catholics,  because  she  would  not  take 
her  religion  at  second  hand.  When  a  young  girl,  in  her 
father's  house — 

"She  spent  whole  nights  in  prayer,  oft  repeating:  Lord,  what 
wilt  thou  have  me  to  do?  And  being  one  night  in  a  most  pro- 
found penitence,  she  said  from  the  bottom  of  her  heart:  'O 
my  Lord!  What  must  I  do  to  please  thee?  For  I  have  nobody 
to  teach  me.  Speak  to  my  soul  and  it  will  hear  thee.'  At  that 
instant  she  heard,  as  if  another  had  spoke  within  her:  Forsa\e 
all  earthly  things.  Separate  thyself  from  the  love  of  the  creatures. 
Deny  thyself.  She  was  quite  astonished,  not  understanding  this 
language,  and  mused  long  on  these  three  points,  thinking  how 
she  could  fulfill  them.  She  thought  she  could  not  live  without 
earthly  things,  nor  without  loving  the  creatures,  nor  without 
loving  herself.  Yet  she  said,  'By  thy  Grace  I  will  do  it,  Lord!' 
But  when  she  would  perform  her  promise,  she  knew  not  where 
to  begin.  Having  thought  on  the  religious  in  monasteries,  that 
they  forsook  all  earthly  things  by  being  shut  up  in  a  cloister,  and 
the  love  of  themselves  by  subjecting  of  their  wills,  she  asked 
leave  of  her  father  to  enter  into  a  cloister  of  the  barefoot  Car- 
melites, but  he  would  not  permit  it,  saying  he  would  rather  see 
her  laid  in  her  grave.  This  seemed  to  her  a  great  cruelty,  for  she 
thought  to  find  in  the  cloister  the  true  Christians  she  had  been 
seeking,  but  she  found  afterwards  that  he  knew  the  cloisters 
better  than  she;  for  after  he  had  forbidden  her,  and  told  her  he 
would  never  permit  her  to  be  a  religious,  nor  give  her  any 


3l6      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

money  to  enter  there,  yet  she  went  to  Father  Laurens,  the  Di- 
rector, and  offered  to  serve  in  the  monastery  and  work  hard  for 
her  bread,  and  be  content  with  Uttle,  if  he  would  receive  her. 
At  which  he  smiled  and  said:  That  cannot  be.  We  must  have 
money  to  build;  we  ta\e  no  maids  without  money;  you  must 
find  the  way  to  get  it,  else  there  is  no  entry  here. 

"This  astonished  her  greatly,  and  she  was  thereby  undeceived 
as  to  the  cloisters,  resolving  to  forsake  all  company  and  live 
alone  till  it  should  please  God  to  show  her  what  she  ought  to 
do  and  whither  to  go.  She  asked  always  earnestly,  'When  shall 
I  be  perfectly  thine,  O  my  God?'  And  she  thought  he  still  an- 
swered her.  When  thou  shalt  no  longer  possess  anything,  and 
shah  die  to  thyself.  'And  where  shall  I  do  that.  Lord?'  He  an- 
swered her.  In  the  desert.  This  made  so  strong  an  impression 
on  her  soul  that  she  aspired  after  this;  but  being  a  maid  of 
eighteen  years  only,  she  was  afraid  of  unlucky  chances,  and  was 
never  used  to  travel,  and  knew  no  way.  She  laid  aside  all  these 
doubts  and  said,  'Lord,  thou  wilt  guide  me  how  and  where  it 
shall  please  thee.  It  is  for  thee  that  I  do  it.  I  will  lay  aside  my 
habit  of  a  maid,  and  will  take  that  of  a  hermit  that  I  may  pass 
unknown.'  Having  then  secretly  made  ready  this  habit,  while 
her  parents  thought  to  have  married  her,  her  father  having 
promised  her  to  a  rich  French  merchant,  she  prevented  the 
time,  and  on  Easter  evening,  having  cut  her  hair,  put  on  the 
habit,  and  slept  a  little,  she  went  out  of  her  chamber  about  four 
in  the  morning,  taking  nothing  but  one  penny  to  buy  bread  for 
that  day.  And  it  being  said  to  her  in  going  out,  Where  is  thy 
faith?  in  a  pennv?  she  threw  it  away,  begging  pardon  of  God 
for  her  fault,  and  saying,  'No,  Lord,  my  faith  is  not  in  a  penny, 
but  in  thee  alone.'  Thus  she  went  away  wholly  delivered  from 
the  heavy  burthen  of  the  cares  and  good  things  of  this  world, 
and  found  her  soul  so  satisfied  that  she  no  longer  wished  for 
anything  upon  earth,  resting  entirely  upon  God,  with  this  only 
fear  lest  she  should  be  discovered  and  be  obliged  to  return  home; 
for  she  felt  already  more  content  in  this  poverty  than  she  had 
done  for  all  her  life  in  all  the  delights  of  the  world."  ^ 

^  An  Apology  for  M.  Antonia  Bourignon,  London,  1699,  pp.  269, 
270,  abridged. 
Another  example  from  Starbuck's  MS.  collection: — 


SAINTLINESS  317 

The  penny  was  a  small  financial  safeguard,  but  an  effec- 
tive spiritual  obstacle.  Not  till  it  was  thrown  away  could  the 
character  settle  into  the  new  equilibrium  completely. 

Over  and  above  the  mystery  of  self-surrender,  there  are 
in  the  cult  of  poverty  other  religious  mysteries.  There  is  the 
mystery  of  veracity:  "Naked  came  I  into  the  world,"  etc. — 
whoever  first  said  that,  possessed  this  mystery.  My  own  bare 
entity  must  fight  the  battle — shams  cannot  save  me.  There  is 
also  the  mystery  of  democracy,  or  sentiment  of  the  equality 
before  God  of  all  his  creatures.  This  sentiment  (which  seems 
in  general  to  have  been  more  widespread  in  Mohammedan 
than  in  Christian  lands)  tends  to  nullify  man's  usual  ac- 
quisitiveness. Those  who  have  it  spurn  dignities  and  hon- 
ors, privileges  and  advantages,  preferring,  as  I  said  in  a 
former  lecture,  to  grovel  on  the  common  level  before  the 
face  of  God.  It  is  not  exactly  the  sentiment  of  humility, 
though  it  comes  so  close  to  it  in  practice.  It  is  humanity^ 

"At  a  meeting  held  at  six  the  next  morning,  I  heard  a  man  relate 
his  experience.  He  said:  The  Lord  asked  him  if  he  would  confess 
Christ  among  the  quarrymen  with  whom  he  worked,  and  he  said  he 
would.  Then  he  asked  him  if  he  would  give  up  to  be  used  of  the 
Lord  the  four  hundred  dollars  he  had  laid  up,  and  he  said  he  would, 
and  thus  the  Lord  saved  him.  The  thought  came  to  me  at  once  that  I 
had  never  made  a  real  consecration  either  of  myself  or  of  my  prop- 
erty to  the  Lord,  but  had  always  tried  to  serve  the  Lord  in  my  way. 
Now  the  Lord  asked  me  if  I  would  serve  him  in  his  way,  and  go 
out  alone  and  penniless  if  he  so  ordered.  The  question  was  pressed 
home,  and  I  must  decide:  To  forsake  all  and  have  him,  or  have  all 
and  lose  him!  I  soon  decided  to  take  him;  and  the  blessed  assurance 
came,  that  he  had  taken  me  for  his  own,  and  my.  joy  was  full.  I 
returned  home  from  the  meeting  with  feelings  as  simple  as  a  child.  1 
thought  all  would  be  glad  to  hear  of  the  joy  of  the  Lord  that  pos- 
sessed me,  and  so  I  began  to  tell  the  simple  story.  But  to  my  greai 
surprise,  the  pastors  (for  I  attended  meetings  in  three  churches)  op 
posed  the  experience  and  said  it  was  fanaticism,  and  one  told  the 
members  of  his  church  to  shun  those  that  professed  it,  and  I  soon 
found  that  my  foes  were  those  of  my  own  household." 


3l8       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

rather,  refusing  to  enjoy  anything  that  others  do  not  share. 
A  profound  morahst,  writing  of  Christ's  saying,  "Sell  all 
thou  hast  and  follow  me,"  proceeds  as  follows: — 

"Christ  may  have  meant:  If  you  love  mankind  absolutely  you 
will  as  a  result  not  care  for  any  possessions  whatever,  and  this 
seems  a  very  likely  proposition.  But  it  is  one  thing  to  believe 
that  a  proposition  is  probably  true;  it  is  another  thing  to  see  it 
as  a  fact.  If  you  loved  mankind  as  Christ  loved  them,  you  would 
see  his  conclusion  as  a  fact.  It  would  be  obvious.  You  would  sell 
your  goods,  and  they  would  be  no  loss  to  you.  These  truths, 
while  literal  to  Christ,  and  to  any  mind  that  has  Christ's  love  for 
mankind,  become  parables  to  lesser  natures.  There  are  in  every 
generation  people  who,  beginning  innocently,  with  no  prede- 
termined intention  of  becoming  saints,  find  themselves  drawn 
into  the  vortex  by  their  interest  in  helping  mankind,  and  by  the 
understanding  that  comes  from  actually  doing  it.  The  aban- 
donment of  their  old  mode  of  life  is  like  dust  in  the  balance.  It  is 
done  gradually,  incidentally,  imperceptibly.  Thus  the  whole 
question  of  the  abandonment  of  luxury  is  no  question  at  all,  but 
a  mere  incident  to  another  question,  namely,  the  degree  to 
which  we  abandon  ourselves  to  the  remorseless  logic  of  our  love 
for  others."  ^ 

But  in  all  these  matters  of  sentiment  one  must  have 
"been  there"  one's  self  in  order  to  understand  them.  No 
American  can  ever  attain  to  understanding  the  loyalty  of  a 
Briton  towards  his  king,  of  a  German  towards  his  emperor; 
nor  can  a  Briton  or  German  ever  understand  the  peace  of 
heart  of  an  American  in  having  no  king,  no  Kaiser,  no 
spurious  nonsense,  between  him  and  the  common  God  of 
all.  If  sentiments  as  simple  as  these  are  mysteries  which  one 
must  receive  as  gifts  of  birth,  how  much  more  is  this  the 
case  with  those  subtler  religious  sentiments  which  we  have 
been  considering!  One  can  never  fathom  an  emotion  or  di- 

^  J.  I.  Chapman,  in  the  Political  Nursery,  vol.  iv.  p.  4,  April,  1900, 
abridged. 


SAINTLINESS  319 

vine  its  dictates  by  standing  outside  of  it.  In  the  glowing 
hour  of  excitement,  however,  all  incomprehensibilities  are 
solved,  and  what  was  so  enigmatical  from  without  becomes 
transparently  obvious.  Each  emotion  obeys  a  logic  of  its 
own,  and  makes  deductions  which  no  other  logic  can  draw- 
Piety  and  charity  live  in  a  different  universe  from  worldly 
lusts  and  fears,  and  form  another  centre  of  energy  alto- 
gether. As  in  a  supreme  sorrow  lesser  vexations  may  become 
a  consolation;  as  a  supreme  love  may  turn  minor  sacrifices 
into  gain;  so  a  supreme  trust  may  render  common  safe- 
guards odious,  and  in  certain  glows  of  generous  excitement 
it  may  appear  unspeakably  mean  to  retain  one's  hold  of  per- 
sonal possessions.  The  only  sound  plan,  if  we  are  ourselves 
outside  the  pale  of  such  emotions,  is  to  observe  as  well  as 
we  are  able  those  who  feel  them,  and  to  record  faithfully 
what  we  observe;  and  this,  I  need  hardly  say,  is  what  I  have 
striven  to  do  in  these  last  two  descriptive  lectures,  which  I 
now  hope  will  have  covered  the  ground  sufficiently  for  our 
present  needs. 


Lectures  XIV  and  XV 
THE   VALUE    OF    SAINTLINESS 

WE  have  now  passed  in  review  the  more  important 
of  the  phenomena  which  are  regarded  as  fruits  of 
genuine  reUgion  and  characteristics  of  men  who  are  devout. 
Today  we  have  to  change  our  attitude  from  that  of  descrip- 
tion to  that  of  appreciation;  we  have  to  ask  whether  the 
fruits  in  question  can  help  us  to  judge  the  absolute  value  of 
what  religion  adds  to  human  life.  Were  I  to  parody  Kant,  I 
should  say  that  a  "Critique  of  pure  Saintliness"  must  be  our 
theme. 

If,  in  turning  to  this  theme,  we  could  descend  upon  our 
subject  from  above  like  Catholic  theologians,  with  our  fixed 
definitions  of  man  and  man's  perfection  and  our  positive 
dogmas  about  God,  we  should  have  an  easy  time  of  it.  Man's 
perfection  would  be  the  fulfillment  of  his  end;  and  his  end 
would  be  union  with  his  Maker.  That  union  could  be  pur- 
sued by  him  along  three  paths,  active,  purgative,  and  con- 
templative, respectively;  and  progress  along  either  path 
would  be  a  simple  matter  to  measure  by  the  application  of  a 
limited  number  of  theological  and  moral  conceptions  and 
definitions.  The  absolute  significance  and  value  of  any  bit 
of  religious  experience  we  might  hear  of  would  thus  be 
given  almost  mathematically  into  our  hands. 

If  convenience  were  everything,  we  ought  now  to  grieve  at 
finding  ourselves  cut  ofT  from  so  admirably  convenient  a 
method  as  this.  But  we  did  cut  ourselves  ofT  from  it  delib- 
erately in  those  remarks  which  you  remember  we  made,  in 
our  first  lecture,  about  the  empirical  method;  and  it  must  be 

320 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  321 

confessed  that  after  that  act  of  renunciation  we  can  never 
hope  for  clean-cut  and  scholastic  results.  We  cannot  divide 
man  sharply  into  an  animal  and  a  rational  part.  We  cannot 
distinguish  natural  from  supernatural  effects;  nor  among 
the  latter  know  which  are  favors  of  God,  and  which  are 
counterfeit  operations  of  the  demon.  We  have  merely  to  col- 
lect things  together  without  any  special  a  priori  theological 
system,  and  out  of  an  aggregate  of  piecemeal  judgments  as 
to  the  value  of  this  and  that  experience — judgments  in 
which  our  general  philosophic  prejudices,  our  instincts,  and 
our  common  sense  are  our  only  guides — decide  that  on  the 
whole  one  type  of  religion  is  approved  by  its  fruits,  and  an- 
other type  condemned.  "On  the  whole" — I  fear  we  shall 
never  escape  complicity  with  that  qualification,  so  dear  to 
your  practical  man,  so  repugnant  to  your  systematizer! 

I  also  fear  that  as  I  make  this  frank  confession,  I  may 
seem  to  some  of  you  to  throw  our  compass  overboard,  and 
to  adopt  caprice  as  our  pilot.  Skepticism  or  wayward  choice, 
you  may  think,  can  be  the  only  results  of  such  a  formless 
method  as  I  have  taken  up.  A  few  remarks  in  deprecation  of 
such  an  opinion,  and  in  farther  explanation  of  the  empiricist 
principles  which  I  profess,  may  therefore  appear  at  this  point 
to  be  in  place. 

Abstractly,  it  would  seem  illogical  to  try  to  measure  the 
worth  of  a  religion's  fruits  in  merely  human  terms  of  value. 
How  can  you  measure  their  worth  without  considering 
whether  the  God  really  exists  who  is  supposed  to  inspire 
them?  If  he  really  exists,  then  all  the  conduct  instituted  by 
men  to  meet  his  wants  must  necessarily  be  a  reasonable  fruit 
of  his  religion — it  would  be  unreasonable  only  in  case  he 
did  not  exist.  If,  for  instance,  you  were  to  condemn  a  reli- 
gion of  human  or  animal  sacrifices  by  virtue  of  your  subjec- 
tive sentiments,  and  if  all  the  while  a  deity  were  really  there 
demanding  such  sacrifices,  you  would  be  making  a  theoret- 


322       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ical  mistake  by  tacitly  assuming  that  the  deity  must  be  non- 
existent; you  would  be  setting  up  a  theology  of  your  own  as 
much  as  if  you  were  a  scholastic  philosopher. 

To  this  extent,  to  the  extent  of  disbelieving  peremptorily 
in  certain  types  of  deity,  I  frankly  confess  that  we  must  be 
theologians.  If  disbeliefs  can  be  said  to  constitute  a  theology, 
then  the  prejudices,  instincts,  and  common  sense  which  I 
chose  as  our  guides  make  theological  partisans  of  us  when- 
ever they  make  certain  beliefs  abhorrent. 

But  such  common-sense  prejudices  and  instincts  are 
themselves  the  fruit  of  an  empirical  evolution.  Nothing  is 
more  striking  than  the  secular  alteration  that  goes  on  in  the 
moral  and  religious  tone  of  men,  as  their  insight  into  nature 
and  their  social  arrangements  progressively  develop.  After 
an  interval  of  a  few  generations  the  mental  climate  proves 
unfavorable  to  notions  of  the  deity  which  at  an  earlier  date 
were  perfectly  satisfactory:  the  older  gods  have  fallen  below 
the  common  secular  level,  and  can  no  longer  be  believed  in. 
Today  a  deity  who  should  require  bleeding  sacrifices  to 
placate  him  would  be  too  sanguinary  to  be  taken  seriously. 
Even  if  powerful  historical  credentials  were  put  forward  in 
his  favor,  we  would  not  look  at  them.  Once,  on  the  contrary, 
his  cruel  appetites  were  of  themselves  credentials.  They 
positively  recommended  him  to  men's  imaginations  in  ages 
when  such  coarse  signs  of  power  were  respected  and  no 
others  could  be  understood.  Such  deities  then  were  wor- 
shiped because  such  fruits  were  relished. 

Doubtless  historic  accidents  always  played  some  later 
Dart,  but  the  original  factor  in  fixing  the  figure  of  the  gods 
must  always  have  been  psychological.  The  deity  to  whom 
the  prophets,  seers,  and  devotees  who  founded  the  particular 
cult  bore  witness  was  worth  something  to  them*  personally. 
They  could  use  him.  He  guided  their  imagination,  warrant- 
ed their  hopes,  and  controlled  their  will — or  else  they  re- 
quired him  as  a  safeguard  against  the  demon  and  a  curber 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  323 

of  Other  people's  crimes.  In  any  case,  they  chose  him  for  the 
value  of  the  fruits  he  seemed  to  them  to  yield.  So  soon  ar 
the  fruits  began  to  seem  quite  worthless;  so  soon  as  they 
conflicted  with  indispensable  human  ideals,  or  thwarted  too 
extensively  other  values;  so  soon  as  they  appeared  childish, 
contemptible,  or  immoral  when  reflected  on,  the  deity  grew 
discredited,  and  was  erelong  neglected  and  forgotten.  It  was 
in  this  way  that  the  Greek  and  Roman  gods  ceased  to  be 
believed  in  by  educated  pagans;  it  is  thus  that  we  ourselves 
judge  of  the  Hindu,  Buddhist,  and  Mohammedan  theolo' 
gies;  Protestants  have  so  dealt  with  the  Catholic  notions  of 
deity,  and  liberal  Protestants  with  older  Protestant  notions; 
it  is  thus  that  Chinamen  judge  of  us,  and  that  all  of  us  now 
living  will  be  judged  by  our  descendants.  When  we  cease 
to  admire  or  approve  what  the  definition  of  a  deity  implies, 
we  end  by  deeming  that  deity  incredible. 

Few  historic  changes  are  more  curious  than  these  muta- 
tions of  theological  opinion.  The  monarchical  type  of  sov- 
ereignty was,  for  example,  so  ineradicably  planted  in  the 
mind  of  our  own  forefathers  that  a  dose  of  cruelty  and  arbi- 
trariness in  their  deity  seems  positively  to  have  been  re- 
quired by  their  imagination.  They  called  the  cruelty  "retrib- 
utive justice,"  and  a  God  without  it  would  certainly  have 
struck  them  as  not  "sovereign"  enough.  But  today  we  abhoi 
the  very  notion  of  eternal  suffering  inflicted;  and  that  arbi« 
trary  dealing-out  of  salvation  and  damnation  to  selected  in- 
dividuals, of  .which  Jonathan  Edwards  could  persuade  him- 
self that  he  had  not  only  a  conviction,  but  a  "delightful  con- 
viction," as  of  a  doctrine  "exceeding  pleasant,  bright,  and 
sweet,"  appears  to  us,  if  sovereignly  anything,  sovereignly 
irrational  and  mean.  Not  only  the  cruelty,  but  the  paltriness 
of  character  of  the  gods  believed  in  by  earlier  centuries  also 
strikes  later  centuries  with  surprise.  We  shall  see  examples 
of  it  from  the  annals  of  Catholic  saintship  which  makes  us 
rub  our  Protestant  eyes.  Ritual  worship  in  general  appeals 


3^4       THE   VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

to  the  modern  transcendentalist,  as  well  as  to  the  ultra-pu- 
ritanic type  of  mind,  as  if  addressed  to  a  deity  of  an  almost 
absurdly  childish  character,  taking  delight  in  toy-shop  fur- 
niture, tapers  and  tinsel,  costume  and  mumbling  and  mum- 
mery, and  finding  his  "glory"  incomprehensibly  enhanced 
thereby :— just  as  on  the  other  hand  the  formless  spaciousness 
of  pantheism  appears  quite  empty  to  ritualistic  natures,  and 
the  gaunt  theism  of  evangelical  sects  seems  intolerably  bald 
and  chalky  and  bleak.  Luther,  says  Emerson,  would  have 
cut  off  his  right  hand  rather  than  nail  his  theses  to  the  door 
at  Wittenberg,  if  he  had  supposed  that  they  were  destined 
to  lead  to  the  pale  negations  of  Boston  Unitarianism. 

So  far,  then,  although  we  are  compelled,  whatever  may 
be  our  pretensions  to  empiricism,  to  employ  some  sort  of  a 
standard  of  theological  probability  of  our  own  whenever  we 
assume  to  estimate  the  fruits  of  other  men's  religion,  yet  this 
very  standard  has  been  begotten  out  of  the  drift  of  common 
life.  It  is  the  voice  of  human  experience  within  us,  judging 
and  condemning  all  gods  that  stand  athwart  the  pathway 
along  which  it  feels  itself  to  be  advancing.  Experience,  if  we 
take  it  in  the  largest  sense,  is  thus  the  parent  of  those  disbe- 
liefs which,  it  was  charged,  were  inconsistent  with  the  ex- 
periential method.  The  inconsistency,  you  see,  is  imma- 
terial, and  the  charge  may  be  neglected. 

If  we  pass  from  disbeliefs  to  positive  beliefs,  it  seems  to 
me  that  there  is  not  even  a  formal  inconsistency  to  be  laid 
against  our  method.  The  gods  we  stand  by  are.  the  gods  we 
need  and  can  use,  the  gods  whose  demands  on  us  are  rein- 
forcements of  our  demands  on  ourselves  and  on  one  another. 
What  I  then  propose  to  do  is,  briefly  stated,  to  test  saintli- 
ness  by  common  sense,  to  use  human  standards  to  help  us 
decide  how  far  the  religious  life  commends  itself  as  an  ideal 
kind  of  human  activity.  If  it  commends  itself,  then  any  the- 
ological beliefs  that  may  inspire  it,  in  so  far  forth  will  stand 
accredited.  If  not,  then  they  will  be  discredited,  and  all  with- 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  325 

out  reference  to  anything  but  human  working  principles.  It 
is  but  the  ehmination  of  the  humanly  unfit,  and  the  sur- 
"vival  of  the  humanly  fittest,  applied  to  religious  beliefs;  and 
if  we  look  at  history  candidly  and  without  prejudice,  we 
have  to  admit  that  no  religion  has  ever  in  the  long  run  estab- 
lished or  proved  itself  in  any  other  way.  Religions  have 
approved  themselves;  they  have  ministered  to  sundry  vital 
needs  which  they  found  reigning.  When  they  violated  other 
needs  too  strongly,  or  when  other  faiths  came  which  served 
the  same  needs  better,  the  first  religions  were  supplanted. 
The  needs  were  always  many,  and  the  tests  were  never 
sharp.  So  the  reproach  of  vagueness  and  subjectivity  and 
"on  the  whole"-ness,  which  can  with  perfect  legitimacy  be 
addressed  to  the  empirical  method  as  we  are  forced  to  use  it; 
is  after  all  a  reproach  to  which  the  entire  life  of  man  in 
dealing  with  these  matters  is  obnoxious.  No  religion  has 
ever  yet  owed  its  prevalence  to  "apodictic  certainty."  In  a 
later  lecture  I  will  ask  whether  objective  certainty  can  ever 
be  added  by  theological  reasoning  to  a  religion  that  already 
empirically  prevails. 

One  word,  also,  about  the  reproach  that  in  following  this 
sort  of  an  empirical  method  we  are  handing  ourselves  ovci 
to  systematic  skepticism. 

Since  it  is  impossible  to  deny  secular  alterations  in  our 
sentiments  and  needs,  it  would  be  absurd  to  affirm  that 
one's  own  age  of  the  world  can  be  beyond  correction  by  the 
next  age.  Skepticism  cannot,  therefore,  be  ruled  out  by  any 
set  of  thinkers  as  a  possibility  against  which  their  conclu- 
sions are  secure;  and  no  empiricist  ought  to  claim  exemp- 
tion from  this  universal  liability.  But  to  admit  one's  liability 
to  correction  is  one  thing,  and  to  embark  upon  a  sea  oi 
wanton  doubt  is  another.  Of  willfully  playing  into  the  hands 
of  skepticism  we  cannot  be  accused.  He  who  acknowledges 
the  imperfectness  of  his  instrument,  and  makes  allowance 


326       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

for  it  in  discussing  his  observations,  is  in  a  much  better  po- 
sition for  gaining  truth  than  if  he  claimed  his  instrument  to 
be  infalhble.  Or  is  dogmatic  or  scholastic  theology  less 
doubted  in  point  of  fact  for  claiming,  as  it  does,  to  be  in 
point  of  right  undoubtable?  And  if  not,  what  command 
over  truth  \yould  this  kind  of  theology  really  lose  if,  instead 
of  absolute  certainty,  she  only  claimed  reasonable  proba- 
bility for  her  conclusions?  If  we  claim  only  reasonable  prob- 
ability, it  will  be  as  much  as  men  who  love  the  truth  can 
ever  at  any  given  moment  hope  to  have  within  their  grasp. 
Pretty  surely  it  will  be  more  than  we  could  have  had,  if  we 
were  unconscious  of  our  liability  to  err. 

Nevertheless,  dogmatism  will  doubtless  continue  to  con- 
demn us  for  this  confession.  The  mere  outward  form  of  in- 
alterable certainty  is  so  precious  to  some  minds  that  to  re- 
nounce it  explicitly  is  for  them  out  of  the  question.  They 
will  claim  it  even  where  the  facts  most  patently  pronounce 
i.ts  folly.  But  the  safe  thing  is  surely  to  recognize  that  all  the 
insights  of  creatures  of  a  day  like  ourselves  must  be  provi- 
sional. The  wisest  of  critics  is  an  altering  being,  subject  to 
the  better  insight  of  the  morrow,  and  right  at  any  moment, 
only  "up  to  date"  and  "on  the  whole."  When  larger  ranges 
of  truth  open,  it  is  surely  best  to  be  able  to  open  ourselves  to 
their  reception,  unfettered  by  our  previous  pretensions. 
"Heartily  know,  when  half-gods  go,  the  gods  arrive." 

The  fact  of  diverse  judgments  about  religious  phenomena 
is  therefore  entirely  unescapable,  whatever  may  be  one's  own 
desire  to  attain  the  irreversible.  But  apart  from  that  fact,  a 
more  fundamental  question  awaits  us,  the  question  whether 
men's  opinions  ought  to  be  expected  to  be  absolutely  uni- 
form in  this  field.  Ought  all  men  to  have  the  same  religion? 
Ought  they  to  approve  the  same  fruits  and  follow  the  same 
leadings?  Are  they  so  like  in  their  inner  needs  that,  for 
hard  and  soft,  for  proud  and  humble,  for  strenuous  and 
lazy,  for  healthy-minded  and  despairing,  exactly  the  same 


THE   VALUE   OF   SAINTLINESS  327 

religious  incentives  are  required?  Or  are  different  functions 
in  the  organism  of  humanity  allotted  to  different  types  of 
man,  so  that  some  may  really  be  the  better  for  a  religion  of 
consolation  and  reassurance,  whilst  others  are  better  for  one 
of  terror  and  reproof?  It  might  conceivably  be  so;  and  we 
shall,  I  think,  more  and  more  suspect  it  to  be  so  as  we  go  on. 
And  if  it  be  so,  how  can  any  possible  judge  or  critic  help 
being  biased  in  favor  of  the  religion  by  which  his  own  needs 
are  best  met?  He  aspires  to  impartiality;  but  he  is  too  close 
to  the  struggle  not  to  be  to  some  degree  a  participant,  and 
he  is  sure  to  approve  most  warmly  those  fruits  of  piety  in 
others  which  taste  most  good  and  prove  most  nourish.' ng  tc 
him. 

I  am  well  aware  of  hov/  anarchic  much  of  what  I  say  may 
sound.  Expressing  myself  thus  abstractly  and  briefly,  I  may 
seem  to  despair  of  the  very  notion  of  truth.  But  I  beseech 
you  to  reserve  your  judgment  until  we  see  it  applied  to  the 
details  which  lie  before  us.  I  do  indeed  disbelieve  that  we  or 
any  other  mortalmen  can  attain  on  a  given  day  to  abso- 
lutely incorrigible  and  unimprovable  truth  about  such  mat- 
ters of  fact  as  those  with  which  religions  deal.  But  I  reject 
this  dogmatic  ideal  not  out  of  a  perverse  delight  in  intellec- 
tual instability.  I  am  no  lover  of  disorder  and  doubt  as  such. 
Rather  do  I  fear  to  lose  truth  by  this  pretension  to  possess  it 
already  wholly.  That  we  can  gain  more  and  more  of  it  by 
moving  always  in  the  right  direction,  I  believe  as  much  as. 
any  one,  and  I  hope  to  bring  you  all  to  my  way  of  thinking 
before  the  termination  of  these  lectures.  Till  then,  do  not,  ] 
pray  you,  harden  your  minds  irrevocably  against  the  em- 
piricism which  I  profess. 

I  will  waste  no  more  words,  then,  in  abstract  justification 
of  my  method,  but  seek  immediately  to  use  it  upon  the  facts. 

In  critically  judging  of  the  value  of  religious  phenomena, 
it  is  very  important  to  insist  on  the  distinction  between  reli- 


328       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

gion  as  an  individual  personal  function,  and  religion  as  an 
institutional,  corporate,  or  tribal  product.  I  drew  this  dis- 
tinction, you  may  remember,  in  my  second  lecture.  The 
word  "religion,"  as  ordinarily  used,  is  equivocal.  A  survey 
of  history  shows  us  that,  as  a  rule,  religious  geniuses  attract 
disciples,  and  produce  groups  of  sympathizers.  When  these 
groups  get  strong  enough  to  "organize"  themselves,  they 
become  ecclesiastical  institutions  with  corporate  ambitions 
of  their  own.  The  spirit  of  politics  and  the  lust  of  dogmatic 
rule  are  then  apt  to  enter  and  to  contaminate  the  originally 
innocent  thing;  so  that  when  we  hear  the  word  "religion" 
nowadays,  we  think  inevitably  of  some  "church"  or  other; 
and  to  some  persons  the  word  "church"  suggests  so  much 
hypocrisy  and  tyranny  and  meanness  and  tenacity  of  super- 
stition that  in  a  wholesale  undiscerning  way  they  glory  in 
saying  that  they  are  "down"  on  religion  altogether.  Even  we 
who  belong  to  churches  do  not  exempt  other  churches  than 
our  own  from  the  general  condemnation. 

But  in  this  course  of  lectures  ecclesiastical  institutions 
hardly  concern  us  at  all.  The-  religious  experience  which  we 
are  studying  is  that  which  lives  itself  out  within  the  private 
breast.  First-hand  individual  experience  of  this  kind  has  al- 
ways appeared  as  a  heretical  sort  of  innovation  to  those  who 
witnessed  its  birth.  Naked  comes  it  into  the  world  and 
lonely;  and  it  has  always,  for  a  time  at  least,  driven  him 
who  had  it  into  the  wilderness,  often  into  the  literal  wilder- 
ness out  of  doors,  where  the  Buddha,  Jesus,  Mohammed,  St. 
Francis,  George  Fox,  and  so  many  others  had  to  go.  George 
Fox  expresses  well  this  isolation;  and  I  can  do  no  better  at 
this  point  than  read  to  you  a  page  from  his  Journal,  refer- 
ring to  the  period  of  his  youth  when  religion  began  to  fer- 
ment within  him  seriously. 

"I  fasted  much,"  Fox  says,  "walked  abroad  in  solitary  places 
many  days,  and  often  took  my  Bible,  and  sat  in  hollow  trees  and 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  329 

lonesome  places  until  night  came  on;  and  frequently  in  the 
night  walked  mournfully  about  by  myself;  for  I  was  a  man  oi 
sorrows  in  the  time  of  the  first  workings  of  the  Lord  in  me. 

"During  all  this  time  I  was  never  joined  in  profession  of  re- 
ligion with  any,  but  gave  up  myself  to  the  Lord,  having  for- 
saken all  evil  company,  taking  leave  of  father  and  mother,  and 
all  other  relations,  and  traveled  up  and  down  as  a  stranger  on 
the  earth,  which  way  the  Lord  inclined  my  heart;  taking  a 
chamber  to  myself  in  the  town  where  I  came,  and  tarrying 
sometimes  more,  sometimes  less  in  a  place:  for  I  durst  not  stay 
long  in  a  place,  being  afraid  both  of  professor  and  profane,  lest; 
being  a  tender  young  man,  I  should  be  hurt  by  conversing  much 
with  either.  For  which  reason  I  kept  much  as  a  stranger,  seek- 
ing heavenly  wisdom  and  getting  knowledge  from  the  Lord; 
and  was  brought  off  from  outward  things,  to  rely  on  the  Lord 
alone.  As  I  had  forsaken  the  priests,  so  I  left  the  separate  preach- 
ers also,  and  those  called  the  most  experienced  people;  for  I  saw 
there  was  none  among  them  all  that  could  speak  to  my  condi- 
tion. And  when  all  my  hopes  in  them  and  in  all  men  were  gone 
so  that  I  had  nothing  outwardly  to  help  me,  nor  could  tell  what 
to  do;  then,  oh  then,  I  heard  a  voice  which  said,  'There  is  one, 
eyen  Jesus  Christ,  that  can  speak  to  thy  condition.'  When  I 
heard  it,  my  heart  did  leap  for  joy.  Then  the  Lord  let  me  see 
why  there  was  none  upon  the  earth  that  could  speak  to  my  con- 
dition. I  had  not  fellowship  with  any  people,  priests,  nor  pro- 
fessors, nor  any  sort  of  separated  people.  I  was  afraid  of  all  car- 
nal talk  and  talkers,  for  I  could  see  nothing  but  corruptions. 
When  I  was  in  the  deep,  under  all  shut  up,  I  could  not  believe 
that  I  should  ever  overcome;  my  troubles,  my  sorrows,  and  my 
temptations  were  so  great  that  I  often  thought  I  should  have 
despaired,  I  was  so  tempted.  But  when  Christ  opened  to  me 
how  he  was  tempted  by  the  same  devil,  and  had  overcome  him, 
and  had  bruised  his  head;  and  that  through  him  and  his  power, 
life,  grace,  and  spirit,  I  should  overcome  also,  I  had  confidence 
in  him.  If  I  had  had  a  king's  diet,  palace,  and  attendance,  all 
would  have  been  as  nothing;  for  nothing  gave  me  comfort  bui 
the  Lord  by  his  power.  I  saw  professors,  priests,  and  people  were 
whole  and  at  ease  in  that  condition  which  was  my  misery,  and 
they  loved  that  which  I  would  have  been  rid  of.  But  the  Lord 


330       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

did  stay  my  desires  upon  himself,  and  my  care  was  cast  upon 
him  alone."  ^ 

A  genuine  first-hand  religious  experience  like  this  is 
bound  to  be  a  heterodoxy  to  its  witnesses,  the  prophet  ap- 
pearing as  a  mere  lonely  madman.  If  his  doctrine  prove  con- 
tagious enough  to  spread  to  any  others,  it  becomes  a  definite 
and  labeled  heresy.  But  if  it  then  still  prove  contagious 
enough  to  triumph  over  persecution,  it  becomes  itself  an 
orthodoxy;  and  when  a  religion  has  become  an  orthodoxy, 
its  day  of  inwardness  is  over:  the  spring  is  dry;  the  faithful 
live  at  second  hand  exclusively  and  stone  the  prophets  in 
their  turn.  The  new  church,  in  spite  of  whatever  human 
goodness  it  may  foster,  can  be  henceforth  counted  on  as  a 
staunch  ally  in  every  attempt  to  stifle  the  spontaneous  reli- 
gious spirit,  and  to  stop  all  later  bubblings  of  the  fountain 
from  which  in  purer  days  it  drew  its  own  supply  of  inspira- 
tion. Unless,  indeed,  by  adopting  new  movements  of  the 
spirit  it  can  make  capital  out  of  them  and  use  them  for  its 
selfish  corporate  designs!  Of  protective  action  of  this  politic 
sort,  promptly  or  tardily  decided  on,  the  dealings  of  the 
Roman  ecclesiasticism  with  many  individual  saints  and  pro- 
phets yield  examples  enough  for  our  instruction. 

The  plain  fact  is  that  men's  minds  are  built,  as  has  been 
often  said,  in  water-tight  compartments.  Religious  after  a 
fashion,  they  yet  have  many  other  things  in  them  beside 
their  religion,  and  unholy  entanglements  and  associations 
inevitably  obtain.  The  basenesses  so  commonly  charged  to 
religion's  account  are  thus,  almost  all  of  them,  not  charge- 
able at  all  to  religion  proper,  but  rather  to  religion's  wicked 
practical  partner,  the  spirit  of  corporate  dominion.  And 
the  bigotries  are  most  of  them  in  their  turn  chargeable  to 
religion's  wicked  intellectual  partner,  the  spirit  of  dogmatic 
dominion,  the  passion  for  laying  down  the  law  in  the  form 

1  George  Fox:  Journal,  Philadelphia,  1800,  pp.  59-61,  abridged. 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  33I 

of  an  absolutely  closed-in  theoretic  system.  The  ecclesiastical 
spirit  in  general  is  the  sum  of  these  two  spirits  of  dominion; 
and  I  beseech  you  never  to  confound  the  phenomena  of 
mere  tribal  or  corporate  psychology  which  it  presents  with 
those  manifestations  of  the  purely  interior  life  which  are  the 
exclusive  object  of  our  study.  The  baiting  of  Jews,  the  hunt- 
ing of  Albigenses  and  Waldenses,  the  stoning  of  Quakers 
and  ducking  of  Methodists,  the  murdering  of  Mormons  and 
the  massacring  of  Armenians,  express  much  rather  that  ab- 
original human  neophobia,  that  pugnacity  of  which  we  all 
share  the  vestiges,  and  that  inborn  hatred  of  the  alien  and 
of  eccentric  and  non-conforming  men  as  aliens,  than  they 
express  the  positive  piety  of  the  various  perpetrators.  Piety 
is  the  mask,  the  inner  force  is  tribal  instinct.  You  believe  as 
little  as  I  do,  in  spite  of  the  Christian  unction  with  which 
the  German  emperor  addressed  his  troops  upon  their  way 
to  China,  that  the  conduct  which  he  suggested,  and  in  which 
other  Christian  armies  went  beyond  them,  had  anything 
whatever  to  do  with  the  interior  religious  life  of  those  con- 
cerned in  the  performance. 

Well,  no  more  for  past  atrocities  than  for  this  atrocity 
should  we  make  piety  responsible.  At  most  we  may  blame 
piety  for  not  availing  to  check  our  natural  passions,  and 
sometimes  for  supplying  them  with  hypocritical  pretexts. 
But  hypocrisy  also  imposes  obligations,  and  with  the  pretext 
usually  couples  some  restriction;  and  when  the  passion  gust 
is  over,  the  piety  may  bring  a  reaction  of  repentance  which 
the  irreligious  natural  man  would  not  have  shown. 

For  many  of  the  historic  aberrations  which  have  been  laid 
to  her  charge,  religion  as  such,  then,  is  not  to  blame.  Yet  of 
the  charge  that  over-zealousness  or  fanaticism  is  one  of  her 
liabilities  we  cannot  wholly  acquit  her,  so  I  will  next  make  a 
remark  upon  that  point.  But  I  will  preface  it  by  a  prelimi- 
nary remark  which  connects  itself  with  much  that  follows. 


^3?-       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Our  survey  of  the  phenomena  of  saindiness  has  unques- 
tionably produced  in  your  minds  an  impression  of  extrava- 
gance. Is  it  necessary,  some  of  you  have  asked,  as  one  ex-- 
ample  after  another  came  before  us,  to  be  quite  so  fantastic- 
ally good  as  that?  We  who  have  no  vocation  for  the  ex- 
tremer  ranges  of  sanctity  will  surely  be  let  ofl  at  the  last  day 
if  our  humility,  asceticism,  and  devoutness  prove  of  a  less 
convulsive  sort.  This  practically  amounts  to  saying  that 
much  that  it  is  legitimate  to  admire  in  this  field  need  never- 
theless not  be  imitated,  and  that  religious  phenomena,  like 
all  other  human  phenomena,  are  subject  to  the  law  of  the 
golden  mean.  Political  reformers  accomplish  their  successive 
tasks  in  the  history  of  nations  by  being  blind  for  the  time  to 
other  causes.  Great  schools  of  art  work  out  the  effects  which 
it  is  their  mission  to  reveal,  at  the  cost  of  a  one-sidedness  for 
which  other  schools  must  make  amends.  We  accept  a  John 
Howard,  a  Mazzini,  a  Botticelli,  a  Michael  Angelo,  with  a 
kind  of  indulgence.  We  are  glad  they  existed  to  show  us 
that  way,  but  we  are  glad  there  are  also  other  ways  of  see- 
ing and  taking  life.  So  of  many  of  the  saints  whom  we  have 
looked  at.  We  are  proud  of  a  human  nature  that  could  be  so 
passionately  extreme,  but  we  shrink  from  advising  others  to 
follow  the  example.  The  conduct  we  blame  ourselves  for 
not  following  lies  nearer  to  the  middle  line  of  human  effort. 
It  is  less  dependent  on  particular  beliefs  and  doctrines.  It  is 
such  as  wears  well  in  different  ages,  such  as  under  different 
skies  all  judges  are  able  to  commend. 

The  fruits  of  religion,  in  other  words,  are,  like  all  human 
products,  liable  to  corruption  by  excess.  Common  sense 
must  judge  them.  It  need  not  blame  the  votary;  but  it  may 
be  able  to  praise  him  only  conditionally,  as  one  who  acts 
faithfully  according  to  his  lights.  He  shows  us  heroism  in 
one  way,  but  the  unconditionally  good  way  is  that  for  which 
no  indulgence  need  be  asked. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  333 

We  find  that  error  by  excess  is  exemplified  by  every  saint- 
ly virtue.  Excess,  in  human  faculties,  means  usually  one- 
sidedness  or  want  of  balance;  for  it  is  hard  to  imagine  an 
essential  faculty  too  strong,  if  only  other  faculties  equally 
strong  be  there  to  cooperate  with  it  in  action.  Strong  affec- 
tions need  a  strong  will;  strong  active  powers  need  a  strong 
intellect;  strong  intellect  needs  strong  sympathies,  to  keep 
life  steady.  If  the  balance  exist,  no  one  faculty  can  possibly 
be  too  strong — we  only  get  the  stronger  all-round  character. 
In  the  life  of  saints,  technically  so  called,  the  spiritual  facul- 
ties are  strong,  but  what  gives  the  impression  of  extrava- 
gance proves  usually  on  examination  to  be  a  relative  de- 
ficiency of  intellect.  Spiritual  excitement  takes  pathological 
forms  whenever  other  interests  are  too  few  and  the  intellect 
too  narrow.  We  find  this  exemplified  by  all  the  saintly  at- 
tributes in  turn — devout  love  of  God,  purity,  charity,  asceti- 
cism, all  may  lead  astray.  I  will  run  over  these  virtues  in  suc- 
cession. 

First  of  all  let  us  take  Devoutness.  When  unbalanced,  one 
of  its  vices  is  called  Fanaticism.  Fanaticism  (when  not  a 
mere  expression  of  ecclesiastical  ambition)  is  only  loyalty 
carried  to  a  convulsive  extreme.  When  an  intensely  loyal 
and  narrow  mind  is  once  grasped  by  the  feeling  that  a  cer- 
tain superhuman  person  is  worthy  of  its  exclusive  devotion, 
one  of  the  first  things  that  happens  is  that  it  idealizes  the 
devotion  itself.  To  adequately  realize  the  merits  of  the  idol 
gets  to  be  considered  the  one  great  merit  of  the  worshiper; 
and  the  sacrifices  and  servilities  by  which  savage  tribesmen 
have  from  time  immemorial  exhibited  their  faithfulness  to 
chieftains  are  now  outbid  in  favor  of  the  deity.  Vocabularies 
are  exhausted  and  languages  altered  in  the  attempt  to  praise 
him  enough;  death  is  looked  on  as  gain  if  it  attract  his 
grateful  notice;  and  the  personal  attitude  of  being  his  dev- 


334       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

otee  becomes  what  one  might  almost  call  a  new  and  exalt- 
ed kind  of  professional  specialty  within  the  tribe. ^  The  leg- 
ends that  gather  round  the  lives  of  holy  persons  are  fruits 
of  this  impulse  to  celebrate  and  glorify.  The  Buddha"  and 
Mohammed  ^  and  their  companions  and  many  Christian 
saints  are  incrusted  with  a  heavy  jewelry  of  anecdotes  which 
are  meant  to  be  honorific,  but  are  simply  abgeschmacJ{t  and 
silly,  and  form  a  touching  expression  of  man's  misguided 
propensity  to  praise. 

An  immediate  consequence  of  this  condition  of  mind  is 
iealousy  for  the  deity's  honor.  How  can  the  devotee  show 

^  Christian  saints  have  had  their  specialties  of  devotion,  Saint  Fran- 
cis to  Christ's  wounds;  Saint  Anthony  of  Padua  to  Christ's  childhood; 
Saint  Bernard  to  his  humanity;  Saint  Teresa  to  Saint  Joseph,  etc.  The 
Shi-ite  Mohammedans  venerate  AH,  the  Prophet's  son-in-law,  instead 
of  Abu-bekr,  his  brother-in-law.  Vambery  describes  a  dervish  whom 
he  met  in  Persia,  "who  had  solemnly  vowed,  thirty  years  before,  that 
'"le  would  never  employ  his  organs  of  speech  otherwise  but  in  utter- 
ing, everlasdngly,  the  name  of  his  favorite,  Ali,  All.  He  thus  wished 
to  signify  to  the  world  that  he  was  the  most  devoted  pardsan  of  that 
Ali  who  had  been  dead  a  thousand  years.  In  his  own  home,  speaking 
with  his  wife,  children,  and  friends,  no  other  word  but  'Ali!'  ever 
passed  his  lips.  If  he  wanted  food  or  drink  or  anything  else,  he  ex- 
pressed his  wants  still  by  repeadng  'Ali!'  Begging  or  buying  at  the 
bazaar,  it  was  always  'Ali!'  Treated  ill  or  generously,  he  would  sdl! 
harp  on  his  monotonous  'Ali!'  Latterly  his  zeal  assumed  such  tre- 
mendous proportions  that,  like  a  madman,  he  would  race,  the  whole 
day,  up  and  down  the  streets  of  the  town,  throwing  his  stick  high 
up  into  the  air,  and  shriek  out,  all  the  while,  at  the  top  of  his  voice, 
'Ali!'  This  dervish  was  venerated  by  everybody  as  a  saint,  and  re- 
ceived everywhere  with  the  greatest  distincdon."  Arminius  Vambery, 
his  Life  and  Adventures,  written  by  Himself,  London,  1889,  p.  69.  On 
the  anniversary  of  the  death  of  Hussein,  All's  son,  the  Shi-ite  Moslems 
sdll  make  the  air  resound  with  cries  of  his  name  and  All's. 

^Compare  H.  C.  Warren:  Buddhism  in  Transladon,  Cambridge, 
U.  S.,  1898,  passim. 

^Compare  }.  L.  Merrick:  The  Life  and  ReHgion  of  Mohammed, 
as  contained  in  the  Sheeah  tradidons  of  the  Hyat-ul-Kuloob,  Boston, 
1850,  passim. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  335 

his  loyalty  better  than  by  sensitiveness  in  this  regard?  The 
slightest  affront  or  neglect  must  be  resented,  the  deity's 
enemies  must  be  put  to  shame.  In  exceedingly  narrow 
minds  and  active  w^ills,  such  a  care  may  become  an  engross- 
ing preoccupation;  and  crusades  have  been  preached  and 
massacres  instigated  for  no  other  reason  than  to  remove  a 
fancied  slight  upon  the  God.  Theologies  represerrting  the 
gods  as  mindful  of  their  glory,  and  churches  with  imperi- 
alistic policies,  have  conspired  to  fan  this  temper  to  a  glow, 
so  that  intolerance  and  persecution  have  come  to  be  vices 
associated  by  some  of  us  inseparably  with  the  saintly  mind. 
They  are  unquestionably  its  besetting  sins.  The  saintly  tem- 
per is  a  moral  temper,  and  a  moral  temper  has  often  to  be 
cruel.  It  is  a  partisan  temper,  and  that  is  cruel.  Between  his 
own  and  Jehovah's  enemies  a  David  knows  no  difference; 
a  Catherine  of  Siena,  panting  to  stop  the  warfare  among 
Christians  which  was  the  scandal  of  her  epoch,  can  think 
of  no  better  method  of  union  among  them  than  a  crusade 
to  massacre  the  Turks;  Luther  finds  no  word  of  protest  or 
regret  over  the  atrocious  tortures  with  which  the  Anabap- 
tist leaders  were  put  to  death;  and  a  Cromwell  praises  the 
Lord  for  delivering  his  enemies  into  his  hands  for  "execu- 
tion." Politics  come  in  in  all  such  cases;  but  piety  finds  the 
partnership  not  quite  unnatural.  So,  when  "freethinkers" 
tell  us  that  religion  and  fanaticism  are  twins,  we  cannot 
make  an  unqualified  denial  of  the  charge. 

Fanaticism  must  then  be  inscribed  on  the  wrong  side  of 
religion's  account,  so  long  as  the  religious  person's  intellect 
is  on  the  stage  which  the  despotic  kind  of  God  satisfies.  But 
as  soon  as  the  God  is  represented  as  less  intent  on  his  own 
honor  and  glory,  it  ceases  to  be  a  danger. 

Fanaticism  is  found  only  where  the  character  is  master- 
ful and  aggressive.  In  gentle  characters,  where  devoutness  is 
intense  and  the  intellect  feeble,  we  have  an  imaginative 
absorption  in  the  love  of  God  to  the  exclusion  of  all  prac 


336       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

deal  human  interests,  which,  though  innocent  enough,  is 
too  one-sided  to  be  admirable.  A  mind  too  narrow  has  room 
but  for  one  kind  of  affection.  When  the  love  of  God  takes 
possession  of  such  a  mind,  it  expels  all  human  loves  and 
human  uses.  There  is  no  English  name  for  such  a  sweet  ex- 
cess of  devotion,  so  I  will  refer  to  it  as  a  theopathic  condi- 
tion. 

The  blessed  Margaret  Mary  Alacoque  may  serve  as  an  ex- 
ample. 

"To  be  loved  here  upon  the  earth,"  her  recent  biographer  ex- 
claims: "to  be  loved  by  a  noble,  elevated,  distinguished  being; 
to  be  loved  with  fidelity,  with  devotion — what  enchantment! 
But  to  be  loved  by  God!  and  loved  by  him  to  distraction 
[aime  jusqu'a  la  folie] ! — Margaret  melted  away  with  love  at 
the  thought  of  such  a  thing.  Like  Saint  Philip  of  Neri  in  form- 
er times,  or  like  Saint  Francis  Xavier,  she  said  to  God:  'Hold 
back,  O  my  God,  these  torrents  which  overwhelm  me,  or  else 
enlarge  my  capacity  for  their  reception.'  "  ^ 

The  most  signal  proofs  of  God's  love  which  Margaret  Mary 
received  were  her  hallucinations  of  sight,  touch,  and  hearing, 
and  the  most  signal  in  turn  of  these  were  the  revelations  of 
Christ's  sacred  heart,  "surrounded  with  rays  more  brilliant  than 
the  Sun,  and  transparent  like  a  crystal.  The  wound  which  he 
received  on  the  cross  visibly  appeared  upon  it.  There  was  a 
crown  of  thorns  round  about  this  divine  Heart,  and  a  cross 
above  it."  At  the  same  time  Christ's  voice  told  her  that,  unable 
longer  to  contain  the  flames  of  his  love  for  mankind,  he  had 
chosen  her  by  a  miracle  to  spread  the  knowledge  of  them.  He 
thereupon  took  out  her  mortal  heart,  placed  it  inside  of  his  own 
and  inflamed  it,  and  then  replaced  it  in  her  breast,  adding: 
"Hitherto  thou  hast  taken  the  name  of  my  slave,  hereafter  thou 
shalt  be  called  the  well-beloved  disciple  of  my  Sacred  Heart." 

In  a  later  vision  the  Saviour  revealed  to  her  in  detail  the 
"great  design"  which  he  wished  to  establish  through  her  instru- 

^  Bougaud:  Hist,  de  la  bicnheureuse  Marguerite  Marie,  Paris,  1894, 
p.  145. 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  337 

mentality.  "I  ask  of  thee  to  bring  it  about  that  every  first  Fri- 
day after  the  week  of  holy  Sacrament  shall  be  made  into  a 
special  holy  day  for  honoring  my  Heart  by  a  general  com- 
munion and  by  services  intended  to  make  honorable  amends 
for  the  indignities  which  it  has  received.  And  I  promise  thee 
that  my  Heart  will  dilate  to  shed  with  abundance  the  influences 
of  its  love  upon  all  those  who  pay  to  it  these  honors,  or  who 
bring  it  about  that  others  do  the  same." 

"This  revelation,"  says  Mgr.  Bougaud,  "is  unquestion- 
ably the  most  important  of  all  the  revelations  which  have 
illumined  the  Church  since  that  of  the  Incarnation  and  of 
the  Lord's  Supper.  .  .  .  After  the  Eucharist,  the  supreme 
cflort  of  the  Sacred  Heart."  ^  Well,  what  were  its  good 
fruits  for  Margaret  Mary's  life.?  Apparently  little  else  but 
sufferings  and  prayers  and  absences  of  mind  and  swoons 
and  ecstasies.  She  became  increasingly  useless  about  the  con- 
vent, her  absorption  in  Christ's  love — 

"which  grew  upon  her  daily,  rendering  her  more  and  more 
incapable  of  attending  to  external  duties.  They  tried  her  in  the 
infirmary,  but  without  much  success,  although  her  kindness, 
zeal,  and  devotion  were  without  bounds,  and  her  charity  rose 
to  acts  of  such  a  heroism  that  our  readers  would  not  bear  the 
recital  of  them.  They  tried  her  in  the  kitchen,  but  were  forced 
to  give  it  up  as  hopeless — everything  dropped  out  of  her  hands. 
The  admirable  humility  with  which  she  made  amends  for  her 
clumsiness  could  not  prevent  this  from  being  prejudicial  to  the 
order  and  regularity  which  must  always  reign  in  a  community. 
They  put  her  in  the  school,  where  the  little  girls  cherished  her, 
and  cut  pieces  out  of  her  clothes  [for  relics]  as  if  she  were  al- 
ready a  saint,  but  where  she  was  too  absorbed  inwardly  to  pay 
the  necessary  attention.  Poor  dear  sister,  even  less  after  her 
visions  than  before  them  was  she  a  denizen  of  earth,  and  they 
had  to  leave  her  in  her  heaven."  ^ 

^  Bougaud:  Hist,  de  la  bienheureuse  Marguerite  Marie,  Paris,  1894, 
pp.  365,  241. 

2  Bougaud:  Op.  cit,  p.  267. 


538       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Poor  dear  sister,  indeed!  Amiable  and  good,  but  so  feeble 
of  intellectual  outlook  that  it  would  be  too  much  to  ask  of 
us,  with  our  Protestant  and  modern  education,  to  feel  any- 
thing but  indulgent  pity  for  the  kind  of  saintship  which 
she  embodies.  A  lower  example  still  of  tkeopathic  saintli- 
ness  is  that  of  Saint  Gertrude,  a  Benedictine  nun  of  the  thir- 
teenth century,  whose  "Revelations,"  a  well-known  mystical 
authority,  consist  mainly  of  proofs  of  Christ's  partiality  for 
her  undeserving  person.  Assurances  of  his  love,  intimacies 
and  caresses  and  compliments  of  the  most  absurd  and 
puerile  sort,  addressed  by  Christ  to  Gertrude  as  an  individ- 
ual, form  the  tissue  of  this  paltry-minded  recital.^  In  read- 
ing such  a  narrative,  we  realize  the  gap  between  the  thir- 
teenth and  the  twentieth  century,  and  we  feel  that  saintli- 
ness   of  character   may   yield   almost   absolutely   worthless 

^  Examples:  "Suffering  from  a  headache,  she  sought,  for  the  glory 
of  God,  to  relieve  herself  by  holding  certain  odoriferous  substances 
in  her  mouth,  when  the  Lord  appeared  to  her  to  lean  over  towards 
her  lovingly,  and  to  find  comfort  Himself  in  these  odors.  After  hav- 
ing gently  breathed  them  in,  He  arose,  and  said  with  a  gratified  air 
to  the  Saints,  as  if  contented  with  what  He  had  done:  'See  the  new 
present  which  my  betrothed  has  given  Me!' 

"One  day,  at  chapel,  she  heard  supernaturally  sung  the  words, 
'Sancttis,  Sa77Ctus,  Sanctus.'  The  Son  of  God  leaning  towards  her  like 
a  sweet  lover,  and  giving  to  her  soul  the  softest  kiss,  said  to  her  at 
the  second  Sanctus:  'In  this  Sanctus  addressed  to  my  person,  receive 
with  this  kiss  all  the  sanctity  of  my  divinity  and  of  my  humanity,  and 
let  it  be  to  thee  a  sufficient  preparation  for  approaching  the  com- 
munion table.'  And  the  next  following  Sunday,  while  she  was  thank- 
ing God  for  this  favor,  behold  the  Son  of  God,  more  beauteous  than 
thousands  of  angels,  takes  her  in  His  arms  as  if  He  were  proud  of  her, 
and  presents  her  to  God  the  Father,  in  that  perfection  of  sanctity  with 
which  He  had  dowered  her.  And  the  Father  took  such  delight  in 
this  soul  thus  presented  by  His  only  Son,  that,  as  if  unable  longer  to 
restrain  Himself,  He  gave  her,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  gave  her  also,  the 
Sanctity  attributed  to  each  by  His  own  Sanctus —  and  thus  she  re- 
mained endowed  with  the  plenary  fullness  of  the  blessing  of  Sanctity, 
bestowed  on  her  by  Omnipotence,  by  Wisdom,  and  by  Love."  Reve- 
lations de  Sainte  Gertrude,  Paris,  1898,  i.  44,  186. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  339 

fruits  if  it  be  associated  with  such  inferior  intellectual  sym- 
pathies. What  with  science,  idealism,  and  democracy,  oui 
own  imagination  has  grown  to  need  a  God  of  an  entirely 
different  temperament  from  that  Being  interested  exclusive- 
ly in  dealing  out  personal  favors,  with  whom  our  ancestor? 
were  so  contented.  Smitten  as  we  are  with  the  vision  of  so- 
cial righteousness,  a  God  indifferent  to  everything  but  adu- 
lation, and  full  of  partiality  for  his  individual  favorites, 
lacks  an  essential  element  of  largeness;  and  even  the  best 
professional  sainthood  of  former  centuries,  pent  in  as  it  is 
to  such  a  conception,  seems  to  us  curiously  shallow  and  un- 
edifying. 

Take  Saint  Teresa,  for  example,  one  of  the  ablest  women, 
in  many  respects,  of  whose  life  we  have  the  record.  She  had 
a  powerful  intellect  of  the  practical  order.  She  wrote  admir- 
able descriptive  psychology,  possessed  a  will  equal  to  any 
emergency,  great  talent  for  politics  and  business,  a  buoyant 
disposition,  and  a  first-rate  literary  style.  She  was  tenacious- 
ly aspiring,  and  put  her  whole  life  at  the  service  of  her  re- 
ligious ideals.  Yet  so  paltry  were  these,  according  to  our 
present  way  of  thinking,  that  (although  I  know  that  others 
have  been  moved  differently)  I  confess  that  my  only  feeling 
in  reading  her  has  been  pity  that  so  much  vitality  of  soul 
should  have  found  such  poor  employment. 

In  spite  of  the  sufferings  which  she  endured,  there  is  a 
curious  flavor  of  superficiality  about  her  genius.  A  Birming- 
ham anthropologist.  Dr.  Jordan,  has  divided  the  human 
race  into  two  types,  whom  he  calls  "shrews"  and  "non- 
shrews"  respectively.^  The  shrew-type  is  defined  as  possess- 
ing an  "active  unimpassioned  temperament."  In  other 
words,  shrews  are  the  "motors,"  rather  than  the  "sen- 
sories,"^  and  their  expressions  are  as  a  rule  more  energetic 

^  FuRNEAux  Jordan:  Character  in  Birth  and  Parentage,  first  edition. 
Later  editions  change  the  nomenclature. 

^As  to  this  distinction,  see  the  admirably  practical  account  in  J. 
M.  Baldwin's  little  book,  The  Story  of  the  Mind,  1898. 


340      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

than  the  feelings  which  appear  to  prompt  them.  Saint 
Teresa,  paradoxical  as  such  a  judgment  may  sound,  was  a 
typical  shrew,  in  this  sense  of  the  term.  The  bustle  of  her 
style,  as  well  as  of  her  life,  proves  it.  Not  only  must  she 
receive  unheard-of  personal  favors  and  spiritual  graces  from 
her  Saviour,  but  she  must  immediately  write  about  them 
and  exploiter  them  professionally,  and  use  her  expertness 
to  give  instruction  to  those  less  privileged.  Her  voluble  ego- 
tism; her  sense,  not  of  radical  bad  being,  as  the  really  con- 
trite have  it,  but  of  her  "faults"  and  "imperfections"  in  the 
plural;  her  stereotyped  humility  and  return  upon  herself,  as 
covered  with  "confusion"  at  each  new  manifestation  of 
God's  singular  partiality  for  a  person  so  unworthy,  are  typi- 
cal of  shrewdom:  a  paramountly  feeling  nature  would  be 
objectively  lost  in  gratitude,  and  silent.  She  had  some  pub- 
lic instincts,  it  is  true;  she  hated  the  Lutherans,  and  longed 
for  the  church's  triumph  over  them;  but  in  the  main  her 
idea  of  religion  seems  to  have  been  that  of  an  endless 
amatory  flirtation — if  one  may  say  so  without  irreverence — 
between  the  devotee  and  the  deity;  and  apart  from  helping 
younger  nuns  to  go  in  this  direction  by  the  inspiration  of 
her  example  and  instruction,  there  is  absolutely  no  human 
use  in  her,  or  sign  of  any  general  human  interest.  Yet  the 
spirit  of  her  age,  far  from  rebuking  her,  exalted  her  as 
superhuman. 

We  have  to  pass  a  similar  judgment  on  the  whole  notion 
of  saintship  based  on  merits.  Any  God  who,  on  the  one 
hand,  can  care  to  keep  a  pedantically  minute  account  of 
individual  shortcomings,  and  on  the  other  can  feel  such  par- 
tialities, and  load  particular  creatures  with  such  insipid 
marks  of  favor,  is  too  small-minded  a  God  for  our  credence. 
When  Luther,  in  his  immense  manly  way,  swept  ofif  by  a 
stroke  of  his  hand  the  very  notion  of  a  debit  and  credit  ac- 
count kept  with  individuals  by  the  Almighty,  he  stretched 
the  soul's  imagination  and  saved  theology  from  puerility. 


THE   VALUE   OF   SAINTLINESS  34I 

So  much  for  mere  devotion,  divorced  from  the  intellectual 
conceptions  which  might  guide  it  towards  bearing  useful 
human  fruit. 

The  next  saintly  virtue  in  which  we  find  excess  is  Purity. 
In  theopathic  characters,  like  those  whom  we  have  just  con- 
sidered, the  love  of  God  must  not  be  mixed  with  any  other 
love.  Father  and  mother,  sisters,  brothers,  and  friends  are 
felt  as  interfering  distractions;  for  sensitiveness  and  narrow- 
ness, when  they  occur  together,  as  they  often  do,  require 
above  all  things  a  simplified  world  to  dwell  in.  Variety  and 
confusion  are  too  much  for  their  powers  of  comfortable 
adaptation.  But  whereas  your  aggressive  pietist  reaches  his 
unity  objectively,  by  forcibly  stamping  disorder  and  diver- 
gence out,  your  retiring  pietist  reaches  his  subjectively, 
leaving  disorder  in  the  world  at  large,  but  making  a  smaller 
world  in  which  he  dwells  himself  and  from  which  he  elimi- 
nates it  altogether.  Thus,  alongside  of  the  church  militant 
with  its  prisons,  dragonnades,  and  inquisition  methods,  we 
have  the  church  jugient,  as  one  might  call  it,  with  its 
hermitages,  monasteries,  and  sectarian  organizations,  both 
churches  pursuing  the  same  object — to  unify  the  life,^  and 
simplify  the  spectacle  presented  to  the  soul.  A  mind  ex- 
tremely sensitive  to  inner  discords  will  drop  one  external 
relation  after  another,  as  interfering  with  the  absorption  of 

^  On  this  subject  I  refer  to  the  work  of  M.  Murisier  (Les  Maladies 
du  Sentiment  Religieux,  Paris,  1901),  who  makes  inner  unification 
the  mainspring  of  the  whole  religious  life.  But  all  strongly  ideal  in- 
terests, religious  or  irreligious,  unify  the  mind  and  tend  to  subordi- 
nate everything  to  themselves.  One  would  infer  from  M.  Murisier 's 
pages  that  this  formal  condition  was  peculiarly  characteristic  of  reli 
gion,  and  that  one  might  in  comparison  almost  neglect  material  con 
tent,  in  studying  the  latter.  I  trust  that  the  present  work  will  convince 
the  reader  that  religion  has  plenty  of  material  content  which  i^ 
characteristic,  and  which  is  more  important  by  far  than  any  general 
psychological  form.  In  spite  of  this  criticism,  I  find  M.  Murisier's 
book  highly  instructive. 


'^^2      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

consciousness  in  spiritual  things.  Amusements  must  go 
first,  then  conventional  "society,"  then  business,  then  family 
duties,  until  at  last  seclusion,  with  a  subdivision  of  the  day 
into  hours  for  stated  religious  acts,  is  the  only  thing  that 
can  be  borne.  The  lives  of  saints  arc  a  history  of  successive 
renunciations  of  complication,  one  form  of  contact  with  the 
outer  life  being  dropped  after  another,  to  save  the  purity  of 
inner  tone.^  "Is  it  not  better,"  a  young  sister  asks  her  Su- 
perior, "that  I  should  not  speak  at  all  during  the  hour  of 
recreation,  so  as  not  to  run  the  risk,  by  speaking,  of  falling 
into  some  sin  of  which  I  might  not  be  conscious?"^  If  the 
life  remains  a  social  one  at  all,  those  who  take  part  in  it 
must  follow  one  identical  rule.  Embosomed  in  this  monot- 
ony, the  zealot  for  purity  feels  clean  and  free  once  more.  The 
minuteness  of  uniformity  maintained  in  certain  sectarian 
communities,  whether  monastic  or  not,  is  something  almost 
inconceivable  to  a  man  of  the  world.  Costume,  phraseology, 
hours,  and  habits  are  absolutely  stereotyped,  and  there  is  no 
doubt  that  some  persons  are  so  made  as  to  find  in  this 
stability  an  incomparable  kind  of  mental  rest. 
We  have  no  time  to  multiply  examples,  so  I  will  let  the 

1  Example:  "At  the  first  beginning  of  the  Servitor's  [Suso's]  in- 
terior life,  after  he  had  purified  his  soul  properly  by  confession,  he 
marked  out  for  himself,  in  thought,  three  circles,  within  which  he 
shut  himself  up,  as  in  a  spiritual  intrenchment.  The  first  circle  was 
his  cell,  his  chapel,  and  the  choir.  When  he  was  within  this  circle, 
he  seemed  to  himself  in  complete  security.  The  second  circle  was  die 
whole  monastery  as  far  as  the  outer  gate.  The  third  and  outermost 
circle  was  the  gate  itself,  and  here  it  was  necessary  for  him  to  stand 
well  upon  his  guard.  When  he  went  outside  diesc  circles,  it  seemed 
to  him  that  he  was  in  the  plight  of  some  wild  animal  which  is  out- 
side its  hole,  and  surrounded  by  the  hunt,  and  therefore  in  need  of 
all  its  cunning  and  watchfulness."  The  Life  of  the  Blessed  Henry 
Suso,  by  Himself,  translated  by  Knox,  London,  1865,  p.  168.   ^ 

2  Vie  dcs  premieres  Religieuses  Dominicaines  de  la  Congregation 
de  St.  Dominique,  a  Nancy;  Nancy,  1896,  p.  129. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  343 

case  of  Saint  Louis  of  Gonzaga  serve  as  a  type  of  excess  in 
purification.  I  think  you  will  agree  that  this  youth  carried 
the  eUmination  of  the  external  and  discordant  to  a  point 
which  we  cannot  unreservedly  admire.  At  the  age  of  ten, 
his  biographer  says: — 

"The  inspiration  came  to  him  to  consecrate  to  the  Mother  of 
God  his  own  virginity — that  being  to  her  the  most  agreeable  of 
possible  presents.  Without  delay,  then,  and  with  all  the  fervoi 
there  was  in  him,  joyous  of  heart,  and  burning  with  love,  he 
made  his  vow  of  perpetual  chastity.  Mary  accepted  the  offering 
of  his  innocent  heart,  and  obtained  for  him  from  God,  as  a  rec- 
ompense, the  extraordinary  grace  of  never  feeling  during  his 
entire  life  the  slightest  touch  of  temptation  against  the  virtue  of 
purity.  This  was  an  altogether  exceptional  favor,  rarely  accord- 
ed even  to  Saints  themselves,  and  all  the  more  marvelous  in  that 
Louis  dwelt  always  in  courts  and  among  great  folks,  where  dan- 
ger and  opportunity  are  so  unusually  frequent.  It  is  true  that 
Louis  from  his  earliest  childhood  had  shown  a  natural  repug- 
nance for  whatever  might  be  impure  or  unvirginal,  and  even  for 
relations  of  any  sort  whatever  between  persons  of  opposite  sex 
But  this  made  it  all  the  more  surprising  that  he  should,  especial- 
ly since  this  vow,  feel  it  necessary  to  have  recourse  to  such  a 
number  of  expedients  for  protecting  against  even  the  shadow 
of  danger  the  virginity  which  he  had  thus  consecrated.  One 
might  suppose  that  if  any  one  could  have  contented  himself 
with  the  ordinary  precautions,  prescribed  for  all  Christians,  it 
would  assuredly  have  been  he.  But  no!  In  the  use  of  preserva- 
tives and  means  of  defense,  in  flight  from  the  most  insignificant 
occasions,  from  every  possibility  of  peril,  just  as  in  the  mortifica- 
tion of  his  flesh,  he  went  farther  than  the  majority  of  saints.  He, 
who  by  an  extraordinary  protection  of  God's  grace  was  never 
tempted,  measured  all  his  steps  as  if  he  were  threatened  on 
every  side  by  particular  dangers.  Thenceforward  he  never  raised 
his  eyes,  either  when  walking  in  the  streets,  or  when  in  society. 
Not  only  did  he  avoid  all  business  with  females  even  more 
scrupulously  than  before,  but  he  renounced  all  conversation  and 


^4      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

every  kind  of  social  recreation  with  them,  although  his  father 
tried  to  make  him  take  part;  and  he  commenced  only  too  early 
to  deliver  his  innocent  body  to  austerities  of  every  kind."  ^ 

At  the  age  of  twelve,  we  read  of  this  young  man  that 
"if  by  chance  his  mother  sent  one  of  her  maids  of  honor  to 
him  with  a  message,  he  never  allowed  her  to  come  in,  but 
listened  to  her  through  the  barely  opened  door,  and  dis- 
missed her  immediately.  He  did  not  like  to  be  alone  with 
his  own  mother,  whether  at  table  or  in  conversation;  and 
■  when  the  rest  of  the  company  withdrew,  he  sought  also  a 
pretext  for  retiring.  .  .  .  Several  great  ladies,  relatives  of 
his,  he  avoided  learning  to  know  even  by  sight;  and  he 
made  a  sort  of  treaty  with  his  father,  engaging  promptly 
and  readily  to  accede  to  all  his  wishes,  if  he  might  only  be 
excused  from  all  visits  to  ladies."  (Ibid.,  p.  71.) 

When  he  was  seventeen  years  old  Louis  joined  the  Jesuit 
order,"  against  his  father's  passionate  entreaties,  for  he  was 
heir  of  a  princely  house;  and  when  a  year  later  the  father 
died,  he  took  the  loss  as  a  "particular  attention"  to  himself 
on  God's  part,  and  wrote  letters  of  stilted  good  advice,  as 
from  a  spiritual  superior,  to  his  grieving  mother.  He  soon 
became  so  good  a  monk  that  if  any  one  asked  him  the  num- 
ber of  his  brothers  and  sisters,  he  had  to  reflect  and  count 
them  over  before  replying.  A  Father  asked  him  one  day  if 
he  were  never  troubled  by  the  thought  of  his  family,  to 
which,  "I  never  think  of  them  except  when  praying  for 
them,"  was  his  only  answer.  Never  was  he  seen  to  hold  in 
his  hand  a  flower  or  anything  perfumed,  that  he  might  take 
pleasure  in  it.  On  the  contrary,  in  the  hospital,  he  used  to 

^  Meschler's  Life  of  Saint  Louis  of  Gonzaga,  French  translation  by 
Lebrequier,  1 89 1,  p.  40. 

^  In  his  boyish  note-book  he  praises  the  monastic  life  for  its  free- 
dom from  sin,  and  for  the  imperishable  treasures,  which  it  enables  us 
to  store  up,  "of  merit  in  God's  eyes  which  makes  of  Him  our  debtor 
for  all  Eternity."  Loc.  cit,  p.  62. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  345 

seek  for  whatever  was  most  disgusting,  and  eagerly  snatch 
tiie  bandages  of  ulcers,  etc.,  from  the  hands  of  his  com- 
panions. He  avoided  worldly  talk,  and  immediately  tried 
to  turn  every  conversation  on  to  pious  subjects,  or  else  he 
remained  silent.  He  systematically  refused  to  notice  his  sur- 
roundings. Being  ordered  one  day  to  bring  a  book  from 
the  rector's  seat  in  the  refectory,  he  had  to  ask  where  the 
rector  sat,  for  in  the  three  months  he  had  eaten  bread  there, 
so  carefully  did  he  guard  his  eyes  that  he  had  not  noticed 
the  place.  One  day,  during  recess,  having  looked  by  chance 
on  one  of  his  companions,  he  reproached  himself  as  for  a 
grave  sin  against  modesty.  He  cultivated  silence,  as  preserv- 
ing from  sins  of  the  tongue;  and  his  greatest  penance  was 
the  limit  which  his  superiors  set  to  his  bodily  penances.  He 
sought  after  false  accusations  and  unjust  reprimands  as  op- 
portunities of  humility;  and  such  was  his  obedience  that, 
when  a  room-mate,  having  no  more  paper,  asked  him  for  a 
sheet,  he  did  not  feel  free  to  give  it  to  him  without  first 
obtaining  the  permission  of  the  superior,  who,  as  such,  stood 
in  the  place  of  God,  and  transmitted  his  orders. 

I  can  find.no  other  sorts  of  fruit  than  these  of  Louis'? 
saintship.  He  died  in  1591,  in  his  twenty-ninth  year,  and  is 
known  in  the  Church  as  the  patron  of  all  young  people.  On 
his  festival,  the  altar  in  the  chapel  devoted  to  him  in  a  cer- 
tain church  in  Rome  "is  embosomed  in  flowers,  arranged 
with  exquisite  taste;  and  a  pile  of  letters  may  be  seen  at  lu 
foot,  written  to  the  Saint  by  young  men  and  women,  an(! 
directed  to  'Paradiso.'  They  are  supposed  to  be  burnt  un 
read  except  by  San  Luigi,  who  must  find  singular  petitioni 
in  these  pretty  little  missives,  tied  up  now  with  a  green 
ribbon,  expressive  of  hope,  now  with  a  red  one,  emblematic 
of  love,"  etc' 

1  Mademoiselle  Mori,  a  novel  quoted  in  Hare's  Walks  in  Rome, 
1900,  i.  55. 
I  cannot  resist  the  temptation  to  quote  from  Starbuck's  book,  11 


346       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Our  final  judgment  of  the  worth  of  such  a  Hfe  as  this 
will  depend  largely  on  our  conception  of  God,  and  of  the 
sort  of  conduct  he  is  best  pleased  with  in  his  creatures.  The 
Catholicism  of  the  sixteenth  century  paid  little  heed  to  so- 
cial righteousness;  and  to  leave  the  world  to  the  devil  whilst 
saving  one's  own  soul  was  then  accounted  no  discreditable 
scheme.  To-day,  rightly  or  wrongly,  helpfulness  in  general 

388,  another  case  of  purification  by  elimination.  It  runs  as  follows: — 
"The  signs  of  abnormality  which  sanctified  persons  show  are  of 
frequent  occurrence.  They  get  out  of  tune  with  other  people;  often 
they  will  have  nothing  to  do  with  churches,  which  they  regard  as 
worldly;  they  become  hypercritical  towards  others;  they  grow  careless 
of  their  social,  polidcal,  and  financial  obligadons.  As  an  instance  of 
this  type  may  be  mendoned  a  woman  of  sixty-eight  of  whom  die 
writer  made  a  special  study.  She  had  been  a  member  of  one  of  the 
most  acdve  and  progressive  churches  in  a  busy  part  of  a  large  city. 
Her  pastor  described  her  as  having  reached  the  censorious  stage.  She 
had  grown  more  and  more  out  of  sympathy  with  the  church;  her 
connection  with  it  finally  consisted  simply  in  attendance  at  prayer- 
meeting,  at  which  her  only  message  was  that  of  reproof  and  con- 
demnation of  the  others  for  living  on  a  low  plane.  At  last  she  with- 
drew from  fellowship  with  any  church.  The  writer  found  her  living 
alone  in  a  little  room  on  the  top  story  of  a  cheap  boarding-house, 
quite  out  of  touch  with  all  human  relations,  but  apparently  happy  in 
the  enjoyment  of  her  own  spiritual  blessings.  Her  time  was  occupied 
in  writing  booklets  on  sanctification — page  after  page  of  dreamy 
rhapsody.  She  proved  to  be  one  of  a  small  group  of  persons  who 
claim  diat  entire  salvation  involves  three  steps  instead  of  tvvo;  not 
only  must  there  be  conversion  and  sanctification,  but  a  third,  which 
they  call  'crucifixion'  or  'perfect  redemption,'  and  which  seems  to 
bear  the  same  relation  to  sanctification  that  this  bears  to  conversion. 
She  related  how  the  Spirit  had  said  to  her,  'Stop  going  to  church. 
Stop  going  to  holiness  meetings.  Go  to  your  own  room  and  I  will 
teach  you.'  She  professes  to  care  nothing  for  colleges,  or  preachers,  or 
churches,  but  only  cares  to  listen  to  what  God  says  to  her.  Her  de- 
scription of  her  experience  seemed  entirely  consistent;  she  is  happy 
and  contented,  and  her  life  is  entirely  satisfactory  to  herself.  While 
listening  to  her  own  story,  one  was  tempted  to  forget  that  it  was 
from  the  life  of  a  person  who  could  not  live  by  it  in  conjunction 
with  her  fellows." 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  347 

human  affairs  is,  in  consequence  of  one  of  tliose  secular 
mutations  in  moral  sentiment  of  which  I  spoke,  deemed  an 
essential  element  of  worth  in  character;  and  to  be  of  some 
public  or  private  use  is  also  reckoned  as  a  species  of  divine 
service.  Other  early  Jesuits,  especially  the  missionaries 
among  them,  the  Xaviers,  Brebeufs,  Jogues,  v/ere  objective 
minds,  and  fought  in  their  way  for  the  world's  welfare;  so 
their  lives  to-day  inspire  us.  But  when  the  intellect,  as  in 
this  Louis,  is  originally  no  larger  than  a  pin's  head,  and 
cherishes  ideas  of  God  of  corresponding  smallness,  the  re- 
sult, notwithstanding  the  heroism  put  forth,  is  on  the  whole 
repulsive.  Purity,  we  see  in  the  object-lesson,  is  not  the  one 
thing  needful;  and  it  is  better  that  a  life  should  contract 
many  a  dirt-mark,  than  forfeit  usefulness  in  its  efforts  to 
remain  unspotted. 

Proceeding  onwards  in  our  search  of  religious  extrava- 
gance, we  next  come  upon  excesses  of  Tenderness  and 
Charity.  Here  saintliness  has  to  face  the  charge  of  preserv- 
ing the  unfit,  and  breeding  parasites  and  beggars.  "Resist 
not  evil,"  "Love  your  enemies,"  these  are  saintly  maxims  of 
which  men  of  this  world  find  it  hard  to  speak  without  im- 
patience. Are  the  men  of  this  world  right,  or  are  the  saints, 
in  possession  of  the  deeper  range  of  truth? 

No  simple  answer  is  possible.  Here,  if  anywhere,  one  feels 
the  complexity  of  the  moral  life,  and  the  mysteriousness  of 
the  way  in  which  facts  and  ideals  are  interwoven. 

Perfect  conduct  is  a  relation  between  three  terms:  the 
actor,  the  objects  for  which  he  acts,  and  the  recipients  of  the 
action.  In  order  that  conduct  should  be  abstractly  perfect, 
all  three  terms,  intention,  execution,  and  reception,  should 
be  suited  to  one  another.  The  best  intention  will  fail  if  it 
either  work  by  false  means  or  address  itself  to  the  wrong 
recipient.  Thus  no  critic  or  estimator  of  the  value  of  con- 
duct can  confine  himself  to  the  actor's  animus  alone,  apart 
from  the  other  elements  of  the  performance.  As  there  is  no 


348       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

worse  lie  than  a  truth  misunderstood  by  those  who  hear  it, 
so  reasonable  arguments,  challenges  to  magnanimity,  and 
appeals  to  sympathy  or  justice,  are  folly  when  we  are  deal- 
ing with  human  crocodiles  and  boa-constrictors.  The  saint 
may  simply  give  the  universe  into  the  hands  of  the  enemy 
by  his  trustfulness.  He  may  by  non-resistance  cut  off  his  own 
survival. 

Herbert  Spencer  tells  us  that  the  perfect  man's  conduct 
will  appear  perfect  only  when  the  environment  is  perfect: 
to  no  inferior  environment  is  it  suitably  adapted.  We  may 
paraphrase  this  by  cordially  admitting  that  saintly  conduct 
would  be  the  most  perfect  conduct  conceivable  in  an  en- 
vironment where  all  were  saints  already;  but  by  adding  that 
in  an  environment  where  few  are  saints,  and  many  the  ex- 
act reverse  of  saints,  it  must  be  ill  adapted.  We  must  frankly 
confess,  then,  using  our  empirical  common  sense  and  ordi- 
aary  practical  prejudices,  that  in  the  world  that  actually  is, 
the  virtues  of  sympathy,  charity,  and  non-resistance  may  be, 
and  often  have  been,  manifested  in  excess.  The  powers  of 
darkness  have  systematically  taken  advantage  of  them.  The 
whole  modern  scientific  organization  of  charity  is  a  conse- 
quence of  the  failure  of  simply  giving  alms.  The  whole  his- 
tory of  constitutional  government  is  a  commentary  an  the 
excellence  of  resisting  evil,  and  when  one  cheek  is  smitten, 
of  smiting  back  and  not  turning  the  other  cheek  also. 

You  will  agree  to  this  in  general,  for  in  spite  of  the  Gos- 
pel, in  spite  of  Quakerism,  in  spite  of  Tolstoi,  you  believe 
in  fighting  fire  with  fire,  in  shooting  down  usurpers,  lock- 
ing up  thieves,  and  freezing  out  vagabonds  and  swindlers. 

And  yet  you  are  sure,  as  I  am  sure,  that  were  the  world 
confined  to  these  hard-headed,  hard-hearted,  and  hard-fisted 
.nethods  exclusively,  were  there  no  one  prompt  to  help  a 
brother  first,  and  find  out  afterwards  whether  he  were 
worthy;  no  one  willing  to  drown  his  private  wrongs  in  pity 
for  the  wronger's  person;  no  one  ready  to  be  duped  many 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  349 

a  time  rather  than  Hve  always  on  suspicion;  no  one  glad  i& 
treat  individuals  passionately  and  impulsively  rather  than 
by  general  rules  of  prudence;  the  v^orld  would  be  an  infi- 
nitely worse  place  than  it  is  now  to  live  in.  The  tender 
grace,  not  of  a  day  that  is  dead,  but  of  a  day  yet  to  be  born 
somehow,  with  the  golden  rule  grown  natural,  would  be 
cut  out  from  the  perspective  of  our  imaginations. 

The  saints,  existing  in  this  way,  may,  with  their  extrava- 
gances of  human  tenderness,  be  prophetic.  Nay,  innumer- 
able times  they  have  proved  themselves  prophetic.  Treating 
those  whom  they  met,  in  spite  of  the  past,  in  spite  of  all 
appearances,  as  worthy,  they  have  stimulated  them  to  be 
worthy,  miraculously  transformed  them  by  their  radiant 
example  and  by  the  challenge  of  their  expectation. 

From  this  point  of  view  we  may  admit  the  human  charity 
which  we  find  in  all  saints,  and  the  great  excess  of  it  which 
we  find  in  some  saints,  to  be  a  genuinely  creative  social 
force,  tending  to  make  real  a  degree  of  virtue  which  it  alone 
is  ready  to  assume  as  possible.  The  saints  are  authors, 
auctores,  increasers,  of  goodness.  The  potentialities  of  de 
velopment  in  human  souls  are  unfathomable.  So  many  whc 
seemed  irretrievably  hardened  have  in  point  of  fact  been 
softened,  converted,  regenerated,  in  ways  that  amazed  the 
subjects  even  more  than  they  surprised  the  spectators,  that 
we  never  can  be  sure  in  advance  of  any  man  that  his  salva- 
tion by  the  way  of  love  is  hopeless.  We  have  no  right  to 
speak  of  human  crocodiles  and  boa-constrictors  as  of  fixedly 
incurable  beings.  We  know  not  the  complexities  of  person- 
ality, the  smouldering  emotional  fires,  the  other  facets  of 
the  character-polyhedron,  the  resources  of  the  subliminal 
region.  St.  Paul  long  ago  made  our  ancestors  familiar  with 
the  idea  that  every  soul  is  virtually  sacred.  Since  Christ  died 
for  us  all  without  exception,  St,  Paul  said,  we  must  despair 
of  no  one.  This  belief  in  the  essential  sacredness  of  every 
one  expresses  itself  to-day  in  all  sorts  of  humane  customs 


350       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

and  reformatory  institutions,  and  in  a  growing  aversion  to 
the  death  penalty  and  to  brutahty  in  punishment.  The 
saints,  with  their  extravagance  of  human  tenderness,  are 
the  great  torch-bearers  of  this  behcf,  the  tip  of  the  wedge, 
the  clearers  of  the  darkness.  Like  the  single  drops  which 
sparkle  in  the  sun  as  they  are  flung  far  ahead  of  the  ad- 
vancing edge  of  a  wave-crest  or  of  a  flood,  they  show  the 
way  and  are  forerunners.  The  world  is  not  yet  with  them, 
so  they  often  seem  in  the  midst  of  the  world's  affairs  to  be 
preposterous.  Yet  they  are  impregnators  of  the  world,  vivi- 
Hers  and  animaters  of  potentialities  of  goodness  which  but 
for  them  would  lie  forever  dormant.  It  is  not  possible  to  be 
quite  as  mean  as  we  naturally  are,  when  they  have  passed 
before  us.  One  fire  kindles  another;  and  without  that  over- 
trust  in  human  worth  which  they  show,  the  rest  of  us 
would  lie  in  spiritual  stagnancy. 

Momentarily  considered,  then,  the  saint  may  waste  his 
tenderness  and  be  the  dupe  and  victim  of  his  charitable 
fever,  but  the  general  function  of  his  charity  in  social  evolu- 
tion is  vital  and  essential.  If  things  are  ever  to  move  up- 
ward, some  one  must  be  ready  to  take  the  first  step,  and  as- 
sume the  risk  of  it.  No  one  who  is  not  willing  to  try  char- 
ity, to  try  non-resistance  as  the  saint  is  always  willing,  can 
tell  whether  these  m.ethods  will  or  will  not  succeed.  When 
they  do  succeed,  they  are  far  more  powerfully  successful 
than  force  or  worldly  prudence.  Force  destroys  enemies; 
and  the  best  that  can  be  said  of  prudence  is  that  it  keeps 
what  we  already  have  in  safety.  But  non-resistance,  when 
successful,  turns  enemies  into  friends;  and  charity  regener- 
ates its  objects.  These  saintly  methods  are,  as  I  said,  creative 
energies;  and  genuine  saints  find  in  the  elevated  excitement 
with  which  their  faith  endows  them  an  authority  and  im- 
pressiveness  which  makes  them  irresistible  in  situations 
where  men  of  shallower  nature  cannot  get  on  at  all  without 
the   use   of   worldly    prudence.   This   practical   proof   that 


THE   VALUE   OF   SAINTLINESS  35I 

worldly  wisdom  may  be  safely  transcended  is  the  saint's 
magic  gift  to  mankind.-^  Not  only  does  his  vision  of  a  bettei" 

1  The  best  missionary  lives  abound  in  the  victorious  combination 
of  non-resistance  with  personal  authority.  John  G.  Paton,  for  ex- 
ample, in  the  New  Hebrides,  among  brutish  Melanesian  cannibals, 
preserves  a  charmed  life  by  dint  of  it.  When  it  comes  to  the  point,  no 
one  ever  dares  actually  to  strike  him.  Native  converts,  inspired  by 
him,  showed  analogous  virtue.  "One  of  our  chiefs,  full  of  the  Christ- 
kindled  desire  to  seek  and  to  save,  sent  a  message  to  an  inland  chief, 
that  he  and  four  attendants  would  come  on  Sabbath  and  tell  them 
the  gospel  of  Jehovah  God.  The  reply  came  back  sternly  forbidding 
their  visit,  and  threatening  with  death  any  Christian  that  approached 
their  village.  Our  chief  sent  in  response  a  loving  message,  telling  them 
that  Jehovah  had  taught  the  Christians  to  return  good  for  evil,  and 
that  they  would  come  unarmed  to  tell  them  the  story  of  how  the  Son 
of  God  came  into  the  world  and  died  in  order  to  bless  and  save  his 
enemies.  The  heathen  chief  sent  back  a  stern  and  prompt  reply  once 
more:  'If  you  come,  you  will  be  killed.'  On  Sabbath  morn  the  Chris- 
tian chief  and  his  four  companions  were  met  outside  the  village  by 
the  heathen  chief,  who  implored  and  threatened  them  once  more.  But 
the  former  said: — 

"  'We  come  to  you  without  weapons  of  war!  We  come  only  to  tell 
you  about  Jesus.  We  believe  that  He  will  protect  us  to-day.' 

"As  they  pressed  steadily  forward  towards  the  village,  spears  began 
to  be  thrown  at  them.  Some  they  evaded,  being  all  except  one  dexter- 
ous warriors;  and  others  they  literally  received  with  their  bare  hands, 
and  turned  them  aside  in  an  incredible  manner.  The  heathen,  ap- 
parendy  thunderstruck  at  these  men  thus  approaching  them  without 
weapons  of  war,  and  not  even  flinging  back  their  own  spears  which 
they  had  caught,  after  having  thrown  what  the  old  chief  called  'a 
shower  of  spears,'  desisted  from  mere  surprise.  Our  Chrisdan  chief 
called  out,  as  he  and  his  companions  drew  up  in  the  midst  of  them 
on  the  village  public  ground: — 

"'Jehovah  thus  protects  us.  He  has  given  us  all  your  spears!  Once 
we  would  have  thrown  them  back  at  you  and  killed  you.  But  now 
we  come,  not  to  fight  but  to  tell  you  about  Jesus.  He  has  changed 
our  dark  hearts.  He  asks  you  now  to  lay  down  all  these  your  other 
weapons  of  war,  and  to  hear  what  we  can  tell  you  about  the  love  of 
God,  our  great  Father,  the  only  living  God.' 

"The  heathen  were  perfectly  overawed.  They  manifestly  looked  on 
these  Christians  as  protected  by  some  Invisible  One.  They  listened  for 
the  first  dme  to  the  story  of  the  Gospel  and  of  the  Cross.  We  lived  to 


552       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

'myrld  console  us  for  the  generally  prevailing  prose  and 
barrenness;  but  even  when  on  the  whole  we  have  to  con- 
fess him  ill  adapted,  he  makes  some  converts,  and  the  en- 
vironment gets  better  for  his  ministry.  He  is  an  effective 
ferment  of  goodness,  a  slow  transmuter  of  the  earthly  into 
1  more  heavenly  order. 

In  this  respect  the  Utopian  dreams  of  social  justice  in 
'ivhich  many  contemporary  socialists  and  anarchists  indulge 
ire,  in  spite  of  their  impracticability  and  non-adaptation  to 
present  environmental  conditions,  analogous  to  the  saint's 
behef  in  an  existent  kingdom  of  heaven.  They  help  to  break 
the  edge  of  the  general  reign  of  hardness  and  are  slow 
leavens  of  a  better  order. 

The  next  topic  in  order  is  Asceticism,  which  I  fancy  you 
are  all  ready  to  consider  without  argument  a  virtue  liable  to 
extravagance  and  excess.  The  optimism  and  refinement  of 
the  modern  imagination  has,  as  I  have  already  said  else- 
where, changed  the  attitude  of  the  church  towards  corporeal 
mortification,  and  a  Suso  or  a  Saint  Peter  of  Alcantara  ^ 

«ee  that  chief  and  all  his  tribe  sitting  in  the  school  of  Christ.  And 
there  is  perhaps  not  an  island  in  these  southern  seas,  amongst  all 
those  won  for  Christ,  where  similar  acts  of  heroism  on  the  part  of 
converts  cannot  be  recited."  John  G.  Paton,  Missionary  to  the  New 
Hebrides,  An  Autobiography,  second  part,  London,  1890,  p.  243. 

1  Saint  Peter,  Saint  Teresa  tells  us  in  her  autobiography  (French 
translation,  p.  333),  "had  passed  forty  years  without  ever  sleeping 
more  than  an  hour  and  a  half  a  day.  Of  all  his  mortifications,  this 
was  the  one  that  had  cost  him  the  most.  To  compass  it,  he  kept  al- 
ways on  his  knees  or  on  his  feet.  The  litde  sleep  he  allowed  nature  to 
take  was  snatched  in  a  sitting  posture,  his  head  leaning  against  a  piece 
of  wood  fixed  in  the  wall.  Even  had  he  wished  to  lie  down,  it  would 
have  been  impossible,  because  his  cell  was  only  four  feet  and  a  half 
long.  In  the  course  of  all  these  years  he  never  raised  his  hood,  no  mat- 
ter what  the  ardor  of  the  sun  or  the  rain's  strength.  He  never  put  on 
li  shoe.  He  wore  a  garment  of  coarse  sackcloth,  with  nothing  else  up- 
dn  his  skin.  This  garment  was  as  scant  as  possible,  and  over  it  a  little 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  353 

appear  to  us  to-day  rather  in  the  light  of  tragic  mounte- 
banks than  of  sane  men  inspiring  us  with  respect.  If  the 
inner  dispositions  are  right,  we  ask,  what  need  of  all  this' 
torment,  this  violation  of  the  outer  nature?  It  keeps  the 
outer  nature  too  important.  Any  one  who  is  genuinely  eman- 
cipated from  the  flesh  will  look  on  pleasures  and  pains, 
abundance  and  privation,  as  alike  irrelevant  and  indifferent. 
He  can  engage  in  actions  and  experience  enjoyments  with- 
out fear  of  corruption  or  enslavement.  As  the  Bhagavad- 
Gita  says,  only  those  need  renounce  worldly  actions  who  are 
still  inwardly  attached  thereto.  If  one  be  really  unattached 
to  the  fruits  of  action,  one  may  mix  in  the  world  with 
equanimity.  I  quoted  in  a  former  lecture  Saint  Augustine'f 
antinomian  saying:  If  you  only  love  God  enough,  you  ma) 
safely  follow  all  your  inclinations.  "He  needs  no  devotional 
practices,"  is  one  of  Ramakrishna's  maxims,  "whose  heart 
is  moved  to  tears  at  the  mere  mention  of  the  name  of 

cloak  of  the  same  stuff.  When  the  cold  was  great  he  took  off  the 
cloak  and  opened  for  a  while  the  door  and  little  window  of  his  cell. 
Then  he  closed  them  and  resumed  the  mantle — his  way,  as  he  told 
us,  of  warming  himself,  and  making  his  body  feel  a  better  tempera- 
ture. It  was  a  frequent  thing  with  him  to  eat  once  only  in  three  days; 
and  when  I  expressed  my  surprise,  he  said  that  it  was  very  easy  if  one 
once  had  acquired  the  habit.  One  of  his  companions  has  assured  me 
that  he  has  gone  sometimes  eight  days  without  food.  .  .  .  His  pov. 
erty  was  extreme;  and  his  mortification,  even  in  his  youth,  was  such 
that  he  told  me  he  had  passed  three  years  in  a  house  of  his  order 
without  knowing  any  of  the  monks  otherwise  than  by  the  sound  of 
their  voice,  for  he  never  raised  his  eyes,  and  only  found  his  way 
about  by  following  the  others.  He  showed  this  same  modesty  on  pub- 
lic highways.  He  spent  many  years  without  ever  laying  eyes  upon  a 
woman;  but  he  confessed  to  me  that  at  the  age  he  had  reached  it  was 
indifferent  to  him  whether  he  laid  eyes  on  them  or  not.  He  was  very 
old  when  I  first  came  to  know  him,  and  his  body  so  attenuated  that 
it  seemed  formed  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  so  many  roots  of  trees. 
With  all  this  sanctity  he  was  very  affable.  He  never  spoke  unless  he 
was  questioned,  but  his  intellectual  right-mindedness  and  grace  gavp 
to  all  his  words  an  irresistible  charm." 


:J54       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Hari."  ^  And  the  Buddha,  in  pointing  out  what  he  called 
"the  middle  way"  to  his  disciples,  told  them  to  abstain  from 
both  extremes,  excessive  mortification  being  as  unreal  and 
unworthy  as  mere  desire  and  pleasure.  The  only  perfect  life, 
he  said,  is  that  of  inner  wisdom,  which  makes  one  thing  as 
indifferent  to  us  as  another,  and  thus  leads  to  rest,  to  peace, 
and  to  Nirvana." 

We  find  accordingly  that  as  ascetic  saints  have  grown 
older,  and  directors  of  conscience  more  experienced,  they 
usually  have  shown  a  tendency  to  lay  less  stress  on  special 
bodily  mortifications.  Catholic  teachers  have  always  pro- 
fessed the  rule  that,  since  health  is  needed  for  efficiency  in 
God's  service,  health  must  not  be  sacrificed  to  mortification. 
The  general  optimism  and  healthy-mindedness  of  liberal 
Protestant  circles  to-day  makes  mortification  for  mortifica- 
tion's sake  repugnant  to  us.  We  can  no  longer  sympathize 
with  cruel  deities,  and  the  notion  that  God  can  take  delight 
in  the  spectacle  of  sufiferings  self-inflicted  in  his  honor  is 
abhorrent.  In  consequence  of  all  these  motives  you  prob- 
ably are  disposed,  unless  some  special  utility  can  be  shown 
in  some  individual's  discipline,  to  treat  the  general  tendency 
to  asceticism  as  pathological. 

Yet  I  believe  that  a  more  careful  consideration  of  the 
whole  matter,  distinguishing  between  the  general  good  in- 
tention of  asceticism  and  the  uselessness  of  some  of  the  par- 
ticular acts  of  which  it  may  be  guilty,  ought  to  rehabilitate 
it  in  our  esteem.  For  in  its  spiritual  meaning  asceticism 
stands  for  nothing  less  than  for  the  essence  of  the  twice-born 
philosophy.  It  symbolizes,  lamely  enough  no  doubt,  but  sin- 
cerely, the  belief  that  there  is  an  element  of  real  wrongness 
in  this  world,  which  is  neither  to  be  ignored  nor  evaded, 
but  which  must  be  squarely  met  and  overcome  by  an  appeal 

^  F.  Max  Mullkr:  P^amakrishna,  his  Life  and  Sayings,  1899,  p.  180. 
^Oldenberg:  Buddha;  translated  by  W.  Hoey,  Londori,  1882,  p. 
127. 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  355 

to  the  soul's  heroic  resources,  and  neutrahzed  and  cleansed 
away  by  suffering.  As  against  this  view,  the  ultra-optimistic 
form  of  the  once-borA  philosophy  thinks  we  may  treat  evil 
by  the  method  of  ignoring.  Let  a  man  who,  by  fortunate 
health  and  circumstances,  escape^  the  suffering  of  any  great 
amount  of  evil  in  his  own  person,  also  close  his  eyes  to  it 
as  it  exists  in  the  wider  universe  outside  his  private  experi' 
ence,  and  he  will  be  quit  of  it  altogether,  and  can  sail 
through  life  happily  on  a  healthy-minded  basis.  But  we  saw 
in  our  lectures  on  melancholy  how  precarious  this  attempt 
necessarily  is.  Moreover  it  is  but  for  the  individual;  and 
leaves  the  evil  outside  of  him,  unredeemed  and  unprovided 
for  in  his  philosophy. 

No  such  attempt  can  be  a  general  solution  of  the  prob 
lem;  and  to  minds  of  sombre  tinge,  who  naturally  feel  life 
as  a  tragic  mystery,  such  optimism  is  a  shallow  dodge  or 
mean  evasion.  It  accepts,  in  lieu  of  a  real  deliverance,  what 
is  a  lucky  personal  accident  merely,  a  cranny  to  escape  by. 
It  leaves  the  general  world  unhelped  and  still  in  the  clutch 
of  Satan.  The  real  deliverance,  the  twice-born  folk  insist, 
must  be  of  universal  application.  Pain  and  wrong  and  death 
must  be  fairly  met  and  overcome  in  higher'  excitement,  oi 
else  their  sting  remains  essentially  unbroken.  If  one  has  ever 
taken  the  fact  of  the  prevalence  of  tragic  death  in  this 
world's  history  fairly  into  his  mind — freezing,  drowning, 
entombment  alive,  wild  beasts,  worse  men,  and  hideous  dis- 
eases— he  can  with  difficulty,  it  seems  to  me,  continue  his 
own  career  of  worldly  prosperity  without  suspecting  that  he 
may  all  the  while  not  be  really  inside  the  game,  that  he  may 
lack  the  great  initiation. 

Well,  this  is  exactly  what  asceticism  thinks;  and  it  volun- 
tarily takes  the  initiation.  Life  is  neither  farce  nor  genteel 
comedy,  it  says,  but  something  we  must  sit  at  in  mourning 
garments,  hoping  its  bitter  taste  will  purge  us  of  our  folly. 
The  wild  and  the  heroic  are  indeed  such  rooted  parts  of  it 


J50       THE    VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

that  healthy-mindedncss  pure  and  simple,  with  its  senti- 
mental optimism,  can  hardly  be  regarded  by  any  thinking 
man  as  a  serious  solution.  Phrases  of  neatness,  cosiness,  and 
comfort  can  never  be  ar!  answer  to  the  sphinx's  riddle. 

In  these  remarks  I  am  leaning  only  upon  mankind's  com- 
mon instinct  for  reality,  which  in  point  of  fact  has  always 
held  the  world  to  be  essentially  a  theatre  for  heroism.  In 
heroism,  we  feel,  life's  supreme  mystery  is  hidden.  We 
tolerate  no  one  who  has  no  capacity  whatever  for  it  in  any 
direction.  On  the  other  hand,  no  matter  what  a  man's 
frailties  otherwise  may  be,  if  he  be  willing  to  risk  death, 
and  still  more  if  he  suffer  it  heroically,  in  the  service  he  has 
chosen,  the  fact  consecrates  him  forever.  Inferior  to  our- 
selves in  this  or  that  way,  if  yet  we  cling  to  life,  and  he  is 
able  "to  fling  it  away  like  a  flower"  as  caring  nothing  for 
k,  we  account  him  in  the  deepest  way  our  born  superior. 
Each  of  us  in  his  own  person  feels  that  a  high-hearted  in- 
iliffercnce  to  life  would  expiate  all  his  shortcomings. 

The  metaphysical  mystery,  thus  recognized  by  common 
s.ense,  that  he  who  feeds  on  death  that  feeds  on  men  pos- 
sesses life  supereminently  and  excellently,  and  meets  best 
the  secret  demands  of  the  universe,  is  the  truth  of  which 
asceticism  has  been  the  faithful  champion.  The  folly  of  the 
cross,  so  inexplicable  by  the  intellect,  has  yet  its  indestruc- 
tible vital  meaning. 

Representatively,  then,  and  symbolically,  and  apart  from 
the  vagaries  into  which  the  unenlightened  intellect  of  for- 
mer times  may  have  let  it  wander,  asceticism  must,  I  be- 
lieve, be  acknowledged  to  go  with  the  profounder  way  of 
handling  the  gift  of  existence.  Naturalistic  optimism  is 
mere  syllabub  and  flattery  and  sponge-cake  in  comparison. 
The  practical  course  of  action  for  us,  as  religious  men, 
would  therefore,  it  seems  to  me,  not  be  simply  to  turn  our 
backs  upon  the  ascetic  impulse,  as  most  of  us  to-day  turn 
them,  but  rather  to  discover  some  outlet  for  it  of  which  the 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  359 

fruits  in  the  way  of  privation  and  hardship  might  be  objec- 
tively useful.  The  older  monastic  asceticism  occupied  itself 
with  pathetic  futilities,  or  terminated  in  the  mere  egotism 
of  the  individual,  increasing  his  own  perfection.^  But  is  it 
not  possible  for  us  to  discard  most  of  these  older  forms  of 
mortification,  and  yet  find  saner  channels  for  the  heroism 
which  inspired  them? 

Does  not,  for  example,  the  worship  of  material  luxury 
and  wealth,  which  constitutes  so  large  a  portion  of  the 
"spirit"  of  our  age,  make  somewhat  for  effeminacy  and  un- 
manliness?  Is  not  the  exclusively  sympathetic  and  facetious 
way  in  which  most  children  are  brought  up  to-day — so  dif- 
ferent from  the  education  of  a  hundred  years  ago,  especially 
in  evangelical  circles — in  danger,  in  spite  of  its  many  ad- 
vantages, of  developing  a  certain  trashiness  of  fibre?  Arc 
there  not  hereabouts  some  points  of  application  for  a  reno- 
vated and  revised  ascetic  discipline? 

Many  of  you  would  recognize  such  dangers,  but  would 
point  to  athletics,  militarism,  and  individual  and  nationaf 
enterprise  and  adventure  as  the  remedies.  These  contem- 
porary ideals  are  quite  as  remarkable  for  the  energy  with 
which  they  make  for  heroic  standards  of  life,  as  contem- 
porary religion  is  remarkable  for  the  way  in  which  it 
neglects  them."  War  and  adventure  assuredly  keep  all  who 
engage  in  them  from  treating  themselves  too  tenderly.  They 
demand  such  incredible  efforts,  depth  beyond  depth  of  exer- 
tion, both  in  degree  and  in  duration,  that  the  whole  scale 
of  motivation  alters.  Discomfort  and  annoyance,  hunger  and 
wet,  pain  and  cold,  squalor  and  filth,  cease  to  have  any 

*  "The  vanities  of  all  others  may  die  out,  but  the  vanity  of  a  saint 
as  regards  his  sainthood  is  hard  indeed  to  wear  away."  Ramakrishna. 
his  Life  and  Sayings,  1899,  p.  172. 

^  "When  a  church  has  to  be  run  by  oysters,  ice-cream,  and  fun,"  1 
read  in  an  American  religious  paper,  "you  may  be  sure  that  it  is  run- 
ning away  from  Christ."  Such,  if  one  may  judge  by  appearances,  i- 
the  present  plight  of  many  of  our  churches. 


358       THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

deterrent  operation  whatever.  Death  turns  into  a  common- 
place matter,  and  its  usual  power  to  check  our  action  van- 
ishes. With  the  annulling  of  these  customary  inhibitions, 
ranges  of  new  energy  are  set  free,  and  life  seems  cast  upon 
a  higher  plane  of  power. 

The  beauty  of  war  in  this  respect  is  that  it  is  so  con- 
gruous with  ordinary  human  nature.  Ancestral  evolution 
has  made  us  all  potential  vv^arriors;  so  the  most  insignifi- 
cant individual,  when  thrown  into  an  army  in  the  field,  is 
weaned  from  whatever  excess  of  tenderness  toward  his 
precious  person  he  may  bring  with  him,  and  may  easily 
develop  into  a  monster  of  insensibility. 

But  when  we  compare  the  military  type  of  self-severity 
with  that  of  the  ascetic  saint,  we  find  a  world-wide  differ- 
ence in  all  their  spiritual  concomitants. 

"  'Live  and  let  live,' "  writes  a  clear-headed  Austrian  offi- 
cer, "is  no  device  for  an  army.  Contempt  for  one's  own 
comrades,  for  the  troops  of  the  enemy,  and,  above  all,  fierce 
contempt  for  one's  own  person,  are  what  war  demands  of 
every  one.  Far  better  is  it  for  an  army  to  be  too  savage, 
too  cruel,  too  barbarous,  than  to  possess  too  much  senti- 
mentality and  human  reasonableness.  If  the  soldier  is  to  be 
good  for  anything  as  a  soldier,  he  must  be  exacdy  the  op- 
posite of  a  reasoning  and  thinking  man.  The  measure  of 
goodness  in  him  is  his  possible  use  in  war.  War,  and  even 
peace,  require  of  the  soldier  absolutely  peculiar  standards  of 
morality.  The  recruit  brings  with  him  common  moral  no- 
tions, of  which  he  must  seek  immediately  to  get  rid.  For 
him  victory,  success,  must  be  everything.  The  most  barbaric 
tendencies  in  men  come  to  life  again  in  war,  and  for  war's 
uses  they  are  incommensurably  good."^ 

These  words  are  of  course  literally  true.  The  immediate 
aim  of  the  soldier's  life  is,  as  Moltke  said,  destruction,  and 

1  C.  V.  B.  K.:  Friedens-  und  Kriegs-moral  der  Heere.  Quoted  by 
Hamon:  Psychologic  du  Militaire  professional,  1895,  p.  xli. 


THE  VALUE  OF   SAINTLINESS  359 

nothing  but  destruction;  and  whatever  constructions  wars 
result  in  are  remote  and  non-miHtary.  Consequently  the 
soldier  cannot  train  himself  to  be  too  feelingless  to  all  those 
usual  sympathies  and  respects,  whether  for  persons  or  for 
things,  that  make  for  conservation.  Yet  the  fact  remains 
that  war  is  a  school  of  strenuous  life  and  heroism;  and,  be- 
ing in  the  line  of  aboriginal  instinct,  is  the  only  school  that 
as  yet  is  universally  available.  But  when  we  gravely  ask 
ourselves  whether  this  wholesale  organization  of  irration- 
ality and  crime  be  our  only  bulwark  against  effeminacy,  wc 
stand  aghast  at  the  thought,  and  think  more  kindly  of 
ascetic  religion.  One  hears  of  the  mechanical  equivalent  of 
heat.  What  we  now  need  to  discover  in  the  social  realm  is 
the  moral  equivalent  of  war:  something  heroic  that  will 
speak  to  men  as  universally  as  war  does,  and  yet  will  be  as 
compatible  with  their  spiritual  selves  as  war  has  proved 
itself  to  be  incompatible.  I  have  often  thought  that  in  the 
old  monkish  poverty-worship,  in  spite  of  the  pedantry  which 
infested  it,  there  might  be  something  like  that  moral  equiva- 
lent of  war  which  we  are  seeking.  May  not  voluntarily  ac- 
cepted poverty  be  "the  strenuous  life,"  without  the  need  of 
crushing  weaker  peoples? 

Poverty  indeed  is  the  strenuous  life — without  brass  bands 
or  uniforms  or  hysteric  popular  applause  or  lies  or  circum- 
locutions; and  when  one  sees  the  way  in  which  wealth- 
getting  enters  as  an  ideal  into  the  very  bone  and  marro\^ 
of  our  generation,  one  wonders  whether,  a  revival  of  the 
belief  that  poverty  is  a  worthy  religious  vocation  may  not 
be  "the  transformation  of  military  courage,"  and  the  spir- 
itual reform  which  our  time  stands  most  in  need  of. 

Among  us  English-speaking  peoples  especially  do  the 
praises  of  poverty  need  once  more  to  be  boldly  sung.  We 
have  grown  literally  afraid  to  be  poor.  We  despise  any  one 
who  elects  to  be  poor  in  order  to  simplify  and  save  his  inner 
life.  If  he  does  not  join  the  general  scramble  and  pant  with 


360      THE   VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

the  money-making  street,  we  deem  him  spiritless  and  lack- 
ing in  ambition.  We  have  lost  the  power  even  of  imagin- 
ing what  'the  ancient  idealization  of  poverty  could  have 
meant:  the  liberation  from  material  attachments,  the  un- 
bribed  soul,  the  manlier  indifference,  the  paying  our  way 
by  what  we  are  or  do  and  not  by  what  we  have,  the  right 
to  fling  away  our  life  at  any  moment  irresponsibly— the 
more  athletic  trim,  in  short,  the  moral  fighting  shape.  When 
we  of  the  so-called  better  classes  are  scared  as  men  were 
never  scared  in  history  at  material  ugliness  and  hardship; 
when  we  put  oflf  marriage  until  our  house  can  be  artistic, 
and  quake  at  the  thought  of  having  a  child  without  a  bank- 
account  and  doomed  to  manual  labor,  it  is  time  for  thinking 
men  to  protest  against  so  unmanly  and  irreligious  a  state 
of  opinion. 

It  is  true  that  so  far  as  wealth  gives  time  for  ideal  ends 
and  exercise  to  ideal  energies,  wealth  is  better  than  poverty 
and  ought  to  be  chosen.  But  wealth  does  this  in  only  a  por- 
tion of  the  actual  cases.  Elsewhere  the  desire  to  gain  wealth 
and  the  fear  to  lose  it  are  our  chief  breeders  of  cowardice 
and  propagators  of  corruption.  There  are  thousands  of  con- 
junctures in  which  a  wealth-bound  man  must  be  a  slave, 
whilst  a  man  for  whom  poverty  has  no  terrors  becomes  a 
freeman.  Think  of  the  strength  which  personal  indifference 
to  poverty  would  give  us  if  we  were  devoted  to  unpopular 
causes.  We  need  no  longer  hold  our  tongues  or  fear  to  vote 
the  revolutionary  or  reformatory  ticket.  Our  stocks  might  fall, 
our  hopes  of  promotion  vanish,  our  salaries  stop,  our  club 
doors  close  in  our  faces;  yet,  while  we  lived,  we  would  im- 
perturbably  bear  witness  to  the  spirit,  and  our  example 
would  help  to  set  free  our  generation.  The  cause  would 
need  its  funds,  but  we  its  servants  would  be  potent  in  pro- 
portion as  we  personally  were  contented  with  our  poverty. 

I  recommend  this  matter  to  your  serious  pondering,  for 
it  is  certain  that  the  prevalent  fear  of  poverty  among  the 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  361 

educated  classes  is  the  worst  moral  disease  from  which  our 
civilization  suffers. 

I  have  now  said  all  that  I  can  usefully  say  about  the  sev- 
eral fruits  of  religion  as  they  are  manifested  in  saintly  lives, 
so  I  will  make  a  brief  review  and  pass  to  my  more  general 
conclusions. 

Our  question,  you  will  remember,  is  as  to  whether  re- 
ligion stands  approved  by  its  fruits,  as  these  are  exhibited 
in  the  saintly  type  of  character.  Single  attributes  of  saintli- 
ness  may,  it  is  true,  be  temperamental  endowments,  found 
in  non-religious  individuals.  But  the  whole  group  of  them 
forms  a  combination  which,  as  such,  is  religious,  for  it  seems 
to  flow  from  the  sense  of  the  divine  as  from  its  psychologi- 
cal centre.  Whoever  possesses  strongly  this  sense  comes 
naturally  to  think  that  the  smallest  details  of  this  world 
derive  infinite  significance  from  their  relation  to  an  unseen 
divine  order.  The  thought  of  this  order  yields  him  a  superior 
denomination  of  happiness,  and  a  steadfastness  of  soul  with 
which  no  other  can  compare.  In  social  relations  his  service- 
ability is  exemplary;  he  abounds  in  impulses  to  help.  His 
help  is  inward  as  well  as  outward,  for  his  sympathy  reaches 
souls  as  well  as  bodies,  and  kindles  unsuspected  faculties 
therein.  Instead  of  placing  happiness  where  common  men 
place  it,  in  comfort,  he  places  it  in  a  higher  kind  of  inner 
excitement,  which  converts  discomforts  into  sources  of  cheer 
and  annuls  unhappiness.  So  he  turns  his  back  upon  no  duty, 
however  thankless;  and  when  we  are  in  need  of  assistance, 
we  can  count  upon  the  saint  lending  his  hand  with  more 
certainty  than  we  can  count  upon  any  other  person.  Finally, 
his  humble-mindedness  and  his  ascetic  tendencies  save  him 
from  the  petty  personal  pretensions  which  so  obstruct  our 
ordinary  social  intercourse,  and  his  purity  gives  us  in  him 
a  clean  man  for  a  companion.  Felicity,  purity,  charity,  pa- 
tience, self-severity — these  are  splendid  excellencies,  and  th« 


362       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

saint  of  all  men  shows  them  in  the  completest  possible 
measure. 

But,  as  we  saw,  all  these  things  together  do  not  make 
saints  infallible.  When  their  intellectual  outlook  is  narrow, 
they  fall  into  all  sorts  of  holy  excesses,  fanaticism  or  theo- 
pathic  absorption,  self-torment,  prudery,  scrupulosity,  gulli- 
bility, and  morbid  inability  to  meet  the  world.  By  the  very 
intensity  of  his  fidelity  to  the  paltry  ideals  with  which  an 
inferior  intellect  may  inspire  him,  a  saint  can  be  even  more 
objectionable  and  damnable  than  a  superficial  carnal  man 
would  be  in  the  same  situation.  We  must  judge  him  not 
sentimentally  only,  and  not  in  isolation,  but  using  our  own 
intellectual  standards,  placing  him  in  his  environment,  and 
estimating  his  total  function. 

Now  in  the  matter  of  intellectual  standards,  we  must  bear 
in  mind  that  it  is  unfair,  where  we  find  narrowness  of  mind, 
always  to  impute  it  as  a  vice  to  the  individual,  for  in  reli- 
gious and  theological  matters  he  probably  absorbs  his  nar- 
rowness from  his  generation.  Moreover,  we  must  not  con- 
found the  essentials  of  saintliness,  which  are  those  general 
passions  of  which  I  have  spoken,  with  its  accidents,  which 
are  the  special  determinations  of  these  passions  at  any  his- 
torical moment.  In  these  determinations  the  saints  will 
usually  be  loyal  to  the  temporary  idols  of  their  tribe.  Tak- 
ing refuge  in  monasteries  was  as  much  an  idol  of  the  tribe 
in  the  middle  ages,  as  bearing  a  hand  in  the  world's  work 
is  to-day.  Saint  Francis  or  Saint  Bernard,  were  they  living 
to-day,  would  undoubtedly  be  leading  consecrated  lives  of 
some  sort,  but  quite  as  undoubtedly  they  would  not  lead 
them  in  retirement.  Our  animosity  to  special  historic  mani- 
festations must  not  lead  us  to  give  away  the  saintly  im- 
pulses in  their  essential  nature  to  the  tender  mercies  of 
inimical  critics. 

The  most  inimical  critic  of  the  saintly  impulses  whom  I 
know  is  Nietzsche.  He  contrasts  them  with  the  worldly  pas- 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAiNTLINESS  363 

sions  as  we  find  these  embodied  in  the  predaceous  military 
character,  altogether  to  the  advantage  of  the  latter.  Your 
born  saint,  it  must  be  confessed,  has  something  about  him 
which  often  makes  the  gorge  of  a  carnal  man  rise,  so  it 
will  be  worth  while  to  consider  the  contrast  in  question 
more  fully. 

Dislike  of  the  saintly  nature  seems  to  be  a  negative  result 
of  the  biologically  useful  instinct  of  welcoming  leadership, 
and  glorifying  the  chief  of  the  tribe.  The  chief  is  the  poten- 
tial, if  not  the  actual  tyrant,  the  masterful,  overpowering 
man  of  prey.  We  confess  our  inferiority  and  grovel  before 
him.  We  quail  under  his  glance,  and  are  at  the  same  time 
proud  of  owning  so  dangerous  a  lord.  Such  instinctive  and 
submissive  hero-worship  must  have  been  indispensable  in 
primeval  tribal  life.  In  the  endless  wars  of  those  times, 
leaders  were  absolutely  needed  for  the  tribe's  survival.  If 
there  were  any  tribes  who  owned  no  leaders,  they  can  have 
left  no  issue  to  narrate  their  doom.  The  leaders  always  had 
good  consciences,  for  conscience  in  them  coalesced  with  will, 
and  those  who  looked  on  their  face  were  as  much  smitten 
with  wonder  at  their  freedom  from  inner  restraint  as  with 
awe  at  the  energy  of  their  outward  performances. 

Compared  with  these  beaked  and  taloned  graspers  of  the 
world,  saints  are  herbivorous  animals,  tame  and  harmless 
barn-yard  poultry.  There  are  saints  whose  beard  you  may,  if 
you  ever  care  to,  pull  with  impunity.  Such  a  man  excites 
no  thrills  of  wonder  veiled  in  terror;  his  conscience  is  full 
of  scruples  and  returns;  he  stuns  us  neither  by  his  inward 
freedom  nor  his  outward  power;  and  unless  he  found  with- 
in us  an  altogether  different  faculty  of  admiration  to  appeal 
to,  we  should  pass  him  by  with  contempt. 

In  point  of  fact,  he  does  appeal  to  a  different  faculty.  Re- 
enacted  in  human  nature  is  the  fable  of  the  wind,  the  sun, 
and  the  traveler.  The  sexes  embody  the  discrepancy.  The 
woman  loves  the  man  the  more  admiringly  the  stormier  he 


364       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

shows  himself,  and  the  world  deifies  its  rulers  the  more  for 
being  willful  and  unaccountable.  But  the  woman  in  turn 
■subjugates  the  man  by  the  mystery  of  gentleness  in  beauty, 
and  the  saint  has  always  charmed  the  world  by  something 
similar.  Mankind  is  susceptible  and  suggestible  in  opposite 
directions,  and  the  rivalry  of  influences  is  unsleeping.  The 
saintly  and  the  worldly  ideal  pursue  their  feud  in  literature 
as  much  as  in  real  life. 

For  Nietzsche  the  saint  represents  little  but  sneakingness 
and  slavishness.  He  is  the  sophisticated  invalid,  the  degen- 
erate par  excellence,  the  man  of  insufficient  vitality.  His 
prevalence  would  put  the  human  type  in  danger. 

"The  sick  are  the  greatest  danger  for  the  well.  The  weaker, 
not  the  stronger,  are  the  strong's  undoing.  It  is  not  fear  of  our 
fellow-man,  which  we  should  wish  to  see  diminished;  for  fear 
rouses  those  who  are  strong  to  become  terrible  in  turn  them- 
selves, and  preserves  the  hard-earned  and  successful  type  of  hu- 
manity. What  is  to  be  dreaded  by  us  more  than  any  other  doom 
\s  not  fear,  but  rather  the  great  disgust,  not  fear,  but  rather  the 
great  pity — disgust  and  pity  for  our  human  fellows.  .  .  .  The 
morbid  are  our  greatest  peril — not  the  'bad'  men,  not  the  preda- 
tory beings.  Those  born  wrong,  the  miscarried,  the  broken — 
they  it  is,  the  weakest,  who  are  undermining  the  vitality  of  the 
race,  poisoning  our  trust  in  life,  and  putting  humanity  in  ques- 
tion. Every  look  of  them  is  a  sigh — 'Would  I  were  something 
other!  I  am  sick  and  tired  of  what  I  am.'  In  this  swamp-soil  of 
self-contempt,  every  poisonous  weed  flourishes,  and  all  so  small, 
so  secret,  so  dishonest,  and  so  sweetly  rotten.  Here  swarm  the 
worms  of  sensitiveness  and  resentment;  here  the  air  smells  odi- 
ous with  secrecy,  with  what  is  not  to  be  acknowledged;  here  is 
woven  endlessly  the  net  of  the  meanest  of  conspiracies,  the  con- 
spiracy of  those  who  suffer  against  those  who  succeed  and  are 
victorious;  here  the  very  aspect  of  the  victorious  is  hated — as  if 
health,  success,  strength,  pride,  and  the  sense  of  power  were  in 
themselves  things  vicious,  for  which  one  ought  eventually  to 
make  bitter  expiation.  Oh,  how  these  people  would  themselves 
Uke  to  inflict  the  expiation,  how  they  thirst  to  be  the  hangmen! 


THE   VALUE    OF    SAINTLINESS  305 

And  all  the  while  their  duplicity  never  confesses  their  hatred  to 
be  hatred."  ^ 

Poor  Nietzsche's  antipathy  is  itself  sickly  enough,  but  we 
all  know  what  he  means,  and  he  expresses  well  the  clash 
between  the  two  ideals.  The  carnivorous-minded  "strong 
man,"  the  adult  male  and  cajinibal,  can  see  nothing  but 
mouldiness  and  morbidness  in  the  saint's  gentleness  and 
self-severity,  and  regards  him  with  pure  loathing.  The 
whole  feud  revolves  essentially  upon  two  pivots:  Shall  the 
seen  world  or  the  unseen  world  be  our  chief  sphere  of 
adaptation?  and  m.ust  our  means  of  adaptation  in  this  seen 
world  be  aggressiveness  or  non-resistance? 

The  debate  is  serious.  In  some  sense  and  to  some  degree 
both  worlds  must  be  acknowledged  and  taken  account  of; 
and  in  the  seen  world  both  aggressiveness  and  non-resis- 
tance are  needful.  It  is  a  question  of  emphasis,  of  more  or 
less.  Is  the  saint's  type  or  the  strong-man's  type  the  more 
ideal? 

It  has  often  been  supposed,  and  even  now,  I  think,  it  ii 
supposed  by  most  persons,  that  there  can  be  one  intrinsically 
ideal  type  of  human  character.  A  certain  kind  of  man,  it  is 
imagined,  must  be  the  best  man  absolutely  and  apart  from 
the  utility  of  his  function,  apart  from  economical  considera- 
tions. The  saint's  type,  and  the  knight's  or  gentleman's  type, 
have  always  been  rival  claimants  of  this  absolute  ideality; 
and  in  the  ideal  of  military  religious  orders  both  types  were 
in  a  manner  blended.  According  to  the  ^^mpirical  philos- 
ophy, however,  all  ideals  are  matters  of  relation.  It  would 
be  absurd,  for  example,  to  ask  for  a  definition  of  "the  ideal 
horse,"  so  long  as  dragging  drays  and  running  races,  bear- 
ing children,  and  jogging  about  with  tradesmen's  packages 
all  remain  as  indispensable  diflerentiations  of  equine  func 

^  Zur  Genealogie  dcr  Moral,  Dritte  Abhandlung,  §  14.  I  hav» 
abridged,  and  in  one  place  transposed,  a  sentence. 


366       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tion.  You  may  take  what  you  call  a  general  all-round  ani- 
mal as  a  compromise,  but  he  will  be  inferior  to  any  horse 
of  a  more  specialized  type,  in  some  one  particular  direction. 
We  must  not  forget  this  now  when,  in  discussing  saintli- 
ness,  we  ask  if  it  be  an  ideal  type  of  manhood.  We  must 
test  it  by  its  economical  relations. 

I  think  that  the  method  which  Mr.  Spencer  uses  in  his 
Data  of  Ethics  will  help  to  fix  our  opinion.  Ideality  in  con- 
duct is  altogether  a  matter  of  adaptation.  A  society  where 
all  were  invariably  aggressive  would  destroy  itself  by  inner 
friction,  and  in  a  society  where  some  are  aggressive,  others 
must  be  non-resistant,  if  there  is  to  be  any  kind  of  order. 
This  is  the  present  constitution  of  society,  and  to  the  mix- 
ture we  owe  many  of  our  blessings.  But  the  aggressive  mem- 
bers of  society  are  always  tending  to  become  bullies,  robbers, 
and  swindlers;  and  no  one  believes  that  such  a  state  of 
things  as  we  now  live  in  is  the  millennium.  It  is  meanwhile 
quite  possible  to  conceive  an  imaginary  society  in  which 
there  should  be  no  aggressiveness,  but  only  sympathy  and 
fairness — any  small  community  of  true  friends  now  realizes 
such  a  society.  Abstractly  considered,  such  a  society  on  a 
large  scale  would  be  the  millennium,  for  every  good  thing 
might  be  realized  there  with  no  expense  of  friction.  To  such 
a  millennial  society  the  saint  would  be  entirely  adapted.  His 
peaceful  modes  of  appeal  would  be  efficacious  over  his  com- 
panions, and  there  would  be  no  one  extant  to  take  advan- 
tage of  his  non-resistance.  The  saint  is  therefore  abstracdy 
a  higher  type  of  man  than  the  "strong  man,"  because  he  is 
adapted  to  the  highest  society  conceivable,  whether  that  so- 
ciety ever  be  concretely  possible  or  not.  The  strong  man 
would  immediately  tend  by  his  presence  to  make  that  so- 
ciety deteriorate.  It  would  become  inferior  in  everything 
save  in  a  certain  kind  of  bellicose  excitement,  dear  to  men 
as  they  now  are. 

Biit  if  we  turn  from  the  abstract  question  to  the  actual 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  367 

situation,  we  find  that  tiie  individual  saint  may  be  well  or 
ill  adapted,  according  to  particular  circumstances.  There  is, 
in  short,  no  absoluteness  in  the  excellence  of  sainthood.  It 
must  be  confessed  that  as  far  as  this  world  goes,  anyone 
who  makes  an  out-and-out  saint  of  himself  does  so  at  his 
peril.  If  he  is  not  a  large  enough  man,  he  may  appear  more 
insignificant  and  contemptible,  for  all  his  saintship,  than 
if  he  had  remamed  a  worldling.^  Accordingly  religion  has 
seldom  been  so  radically  taken  in  our  Western  world  that 
the  devotee  could  not  mix  it  with  some  worldly  temper- 
It  has  always  found  good  men  who  could  follow  most  ot 
Its  impulses,  but  who  stopped  short  when  it  came  to  non- 
resistance.  Christ  himself  was  fierce  upon  occasion.  Crom- 
wells,  Stonewall  Jacksons,  Gordons,  show  that  Christians 
can  be  strong  men  also. 

How  is  success  to  be  absolutely  measured  when  there  are 
so  many  environments  and  so  many  ways  of  looking  at  the 
adaptation?  It  cannot  be  measured  absolutely;  the  verdict 
will  vary  according  to  the  point  of  view  adopted.  From  the 
biological  point  of  view  Saint  Paul  was  a  failure,  because 
he  was  beheaded.  Yet  he  was  magnificently  adapted  to  the 
larger  environment  of  history;  and  so  far  as  any  saint's  ex- 
ample is  a  leaven  of  righteousness  in  the  world,  and  draws 
it  in  the  direction  of  more  prevalent  habits  of  saintliness,  he 
is  a  success,  no  matter  what  his  immediate  bad  fortune  may 
be.  The  greatest  saints,  the  spiritual  heroes  whom  every  one 
acknowledges,  the  Francises,  Bernards,  Luthers,  Loyolas, 
Wesleys,  Channings,  Moodys,  Gratrys,  the  Phillips  Brookses, 
the  Agnes  Joneses,  Margaret  Hallahans,  and  Dora  Patti- 

1  We  all  know  daft  saints,  and  they  inspire  a  queer  kind  of  aversion. 
But  in  comparing  saints  with  strong  men  we  must  choose  individual'' 
on  the  same  intellectual  level.  The  under-witted  strong  man,  homolc- 
gous  in  his  sphere  with  the  under-witted  saint,  is  the  bully  of  th  ' 
slums,  the  hooligan  or  rowdy.  Surely  on  this  level  also  the  saini  pre 
serves  a  certain  superiority. 


368       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

sons,  are  successes  from  the  outset.  They  show  themselves, 
and  there  is  no  question;  every  one  perceives  their  strength 
and  stature.  Their  sense  of  mystery  in  things,  their  passion, 
their  goodness,  irradiate  about  them  and  enlarge  their  out- 
lines while  they  soften  them.  They  are  like  pictures  with 
an  atmosphere  and  background;  and,  placed  alongside  of 
them,  the  strong  men  of  this  world  and  no  other  seem  as 
dry  as  sticks,  as  hard  and  crude  as  blocks  of  stone  or  brick- 
bats. 

In  a  general  way,  then,  and  "on  the  whole,"  ^  our  aban- 
donment of  theological  criteria,  and  our  testing  of  religion 
by  practical  common  sense  and  the  empirical  method,  leave 
it  in  possession  of  its  towering  place  in  history.  Economi- 
cally, the  saintly  group  of  qualities  is  indispensable  to  the 
world's  welfare.  The  great  saints  are  immediate  successes; 
the  smaller  ones  are  at  least  heralds  and  harbingers,  and 
they  may  be  leavens  also,  of  a  better  mundane  order.  Let 
us  be  saints,  then,  if  we  can,  whether  or  not  we  succeed 
visibly  and  temporally.  But  in  our  Father's  house  are  many 
mansions,  and  each  of  us  must  discover  for  himself  the  kind 
of  religion  and  the  amount  of  saintship  which  best  com- 
ports with  what  he  believes  to  be  his  powers  and  feels  to  be 
his  truest  mission  and  vocation.  There  are  no  successes  to 
be  guaranteed  and  no  set  orders  to  be  given  to  individuals, 
so  long  as  we  follow  the  methods  of  empirical  philosophy. 

This  is  my  conclusion  so  far.  I  know  that  on  some  of 
your  minds  it  leaves  a  feeling  of  wonder  that  such  a  method 
should  have  been  applied  to  such  a  subject,  and  this  in  spite 
of  all  those  remarks  about  empiricism  which  I  made  at  the 
beginning  of  Lecture  XIIL^  How,  you  say,  can  religion, 
which  believes  in  two  worlds  and  an  invisible  order,  be  esti- 
mated by  the  adaptation  of  its  fruits  to  this  world's  order 

^  See  above,  p.  321. 
-Above,  pp.  321-327. 


THE   VALUE   OF    SAINTLINESS  369 

alone?  It  is  its  truth,  not  its  utility,  you  insist,  upon  which 
our  verdict  ought  to  depend.  If  religion  is  true,  its  fruits 
are  good  fruits,  even  though  in  this  world  they  should  prove 
uniformly  ill  adapted  and  full  of  -naught  but  pathos.  It  goes 
back,  then,  after  all,  to  the  question  of  the  truth  of  theology. 
The  plot  inevitably  thickens  upon  us;  we  cannot  escape 
theoretical  considerations.  I  propose,  then,  that  to  some  de- 
gree we  face  the  responsibility.  Religious  persons  have  often, 
though  not  uniformly,  professed  to  see  truth  in  a  special 
manner.  That  manner  is  known  as  mysticism.  I  will  conse- 
quently now  proceed  to  treat  at  some  length  of  mystical 
phenomena,  and  after  that,  though  more  briefly,  I  will  con- 
sider religious  philosophy. 


Lectures  XVI  and  XVII 
MYSTICISM 

OVER  and  over  again  in  these  lectures  I  have  raised 
points  and  left  them  open  and  unfinished  until  we 
should  have  come  to  the  subject  of  Mysticism.  Some  of  you,  I 
fear,  may  have  smiled  as  you  noted  my  reiterated  postpone- 
ments. But  now  the  hour  has  come  when  mysticism  must 
be  faced  in  good  earnest,  and  those  broken  threads  wound 
up  together.  One  may  say  truly,  I  think,  that  personal  reli- 
gious experience  has  its  root  and  centre  in  mystical  states  of 
consciousness;  so  for  us,  who  in  these  lectures  are  treating 
personal  experience  as  the  exclusive  subject  of  our  study, 
such  states  of  consciousness  ought  to  form  the  vital  chapter 
from  which  the  other  chapters  get  their  light.  Whether  my 
treatment  of  mystical  states  will  shed  more  light  or  dark- 
ness, I  do  not  know,  for  my  own  constitution  shuts  me  out 
from  their  enjoyment  almost  entirely,  and  I  can  speak  of 
them  only  at  second  hand.  But  though  forced  to  look  upon 
the  subject  so  externally,  I  will  be  as  objective  and  receptive 
as  I  can;  and  I  think  I  shall  at  least  succeed  in  convincing 
you  of  the  reality  of  the  states  in  question,  and  of  the  para- 
mount importance  of  their  function. 

First  of  all,  then,  I  ask,  What  does  the  expression  "mysti- 
cal states  of  consciousness"  mean?  How  do  we  part  ofl 
mystical  states  from  other  states? 

The  words  "mysticism"  and  "mystical"  are  often  used  as 
terms  of  mere  reproach,  to  throw  at  any  opinion  which  we 
regard  as  vague  and  vast  and  sentimental,  and  without  a 
base  in  either  facts  or  logic.  For  some  writers  a  "mystic"  is 

370 


MYSTICISM  371 

any  person  who  believes  in  thought-transference,  or  spirit- 
return.  Employed  in  this  way  the  word  has  little  value: 
there  are  too  many  less  ambiguous  synonyms.  So,  to  keep 
it  useful  by  restricting  it,  I  will  do  what  I  did  in  the  case 
of  the  word  "religion,"  and  simply  propose  to  you  four 
marks  which,  when  an  experience  has  them,  may  justify  us 
in  calling  it  mystical  for  the  purpose  of  the  present  lectures. 
In  this  way  we  shall  save  verbal  disputation,  and  the  re- 
criminations that  generally  go  therewith. 

1.  Ineff ability. — The  handiest  of  the  marks  by  which  I 
classify  a  state  of  mind  as  mystical  is  negative.  The  subject 
of  it  immediately  says  that  it  defies  expression,  that  no  ade- 
quate report  of  its  contents  can  be  given  in  words.  It  follows 
from  this  that  its  quality  must  be  directly  experienced;  it 
cannot  be  imparted  or  transferred  to  others.  In  this  peculiar- 
ity mystical  states  are  more  like  states  of  feeling  than  like 
states  of  intellect.  No  one  can  make  clear  to  another  who 
has  never  had  a  certain  feeling,  in.  what  the  quality  or 
worth  of  it  consists.  One  must  have  musical  ears  to  know 
the  value  of  a  symphony;  one  must  have  been  in  love  one's 
self  to  understand  a  lover's  state  of  mind.  Lacking  the  heart 
or  ear,  we  cannot  interpret  the  musician  or  the  lover  justly, 
and  are  even  likely  to  consider  him  weak-minded  or  absurd. 
The  mystic  finds  that  most  of  us  accord  to  his  experiences 
an  equally  incompetent  treatment. 

2.  Noetic  quality. — Although  so  similar  to  states  of  feel- 
ing, mystical  states  seem  to  those  who  experience  them  to 
be  also  states  of  knowledge.  They  are  states  of  insight  into 
depths  of  truth  unplumbed  by  the  discursive  intellect.  They 
are  illuminations,  revelations,  full  of  significance  and  impor- 
tance, all  inarticulate  though  they  remain;  and  as  a  rule 
they  carry  with  them  a  curious  sense  of  authority  for  after- 
time. 

These  two  characters  will  entitle  any  state  to  be  called 
mystical,  in  the  sense  in  which  I  use  the  word.  Two  other 


372       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

qualities  are  less  sharply  marked,  but  are  usually  found. 
These  are: — 

^.  Transiency. — Mystical  states  cannot  be  sustained  for 
long.  Except  in  rare  instances,  half  an  hour,  or  at  most  an 
hour  or  two,  seems  to  be  the  limit  beyond  which  they  fade 
into  the  light  of  common  day.  Often,  when  faded,  their 
quality  can  but  imperfectly  be  reproduced  in  memory;  but 
when  they  recur  it  is  recognized;  and  from  one  recurrence 
to  another  it  is  susceptible  of  continuous  development  in 
what  is  felt  as  inner  richness  and  importance. 

4.  Passivity. — Although  the  oncoming  of  mystical  states 
may  be  facilitated  by  preliminary  voluntary  operations,  as 
by  fixing  the  attention,  or  going  through  certain  bodily 
performances,  or  in  other  ways  which  manuals  of  mysticism 
prescribe;  yet  when  the  characteristic  sort  of  consciousness 
once  has  set  in,  the  mystic  feels  as  if  his  own  will  were  in 
abeyance,  and  indeed  sometimes  as  if  he  were  grasped  and 
held  by  a  superior  power.  This  latter  peculiarity  connects 
mystical  states  with  certain  definite  phenomena  of  second- 
ary or  alternative  personality,  such  as  prophetic  speech,  au- 
tomatic writing,  or  the  mediumistic  trance.  When  these  lat- 
ter conditions  are  well  pronounced,  however,  there  may  be 
no  recollection  whatever  of  the  phenomenon,  and  it  may 
have  no  significance  for  the  subject's  usual  inner  life,  to 
which,  as  it  were,  it  makes  a  mere  interruption.  Mystical 
states,  strictly  so-called,  are  never  merely  interruptive.  Some 
memory  of  their  content  always  remains,  and  a  profound 
sense  of  their  importance.  They  modify  the  inner  life  of  the 
subject  between  the  times  of  their  recurrence.  Sharp  divi- 
sions in  this  region  are,  however,  difficult  to  make,  and  we 
find  all  sorts  of  gradations  and  mixtures. 

These  four  characteristics  are  sufficient  to  mark  out  a 
group  of  states  of  consciousness  peculiar  enough  to  deserve 
a  special  name  and  to  call  for  careful  study.  Let  it  then  be 
called  the  mystical  group. 


MYSTICISM  373 

Our  next  step  should  be  to  gain  acquaintance  with  some 
typical  examples.  Professional  mystics  at  the  height  of  their 
development  have  often  elaborately  organized  experiences 
and  a  philosophy  based  thereupon.  But  you  remember  what 
I  said  in  my  first  lecture:  phenomena  are  best  understood 
when  placed  within  their  series,  studied  in  their  germ  and 
in  their  over-ripe  decay,  and  compared  with  their  exagger- 
ated and  degenerated  kindred.  The  range  of  mystical  ex- 
perience is  very  wide,  much  too  wide  for  us  to  cover  in  the 
time  at  our  disposal.  Yet  the  method  of  serial  study  is  so 
essential  for  interpretation  that  if  we  really  wish  to  reach 
conclusions  we  must  use  it.  I  will  begin,  therefore,  with 
phenomena  which  claim  no  special  religious  significance, 
and  end  with  those  of  which  the  religious  pretensions  are 
extreme. 

The  simplest  rudiment  of  mystical  experience  would 
seem  to  be  that  deepened  sense  of  the  significance  of  a 
maxim  or  formula  which  occasionally  sweeps  over  one, 
"I've  heard  that  said  all  my  life,"  we  exclaim,  "but  I  never 
realized  its  full  meaning  until  now."  "When  a  fellow- 
monk,"  said  Luther,  "one  day  repeated  the  words  of  the 
Creed :  'I  believe  in  the  forgiveness  of  sins,'  I  saw  the  Scrip- 
ture in  an  entirely  new  light;  and  straightway  I  felt  as  if  I 
were  born  anew.  It  was  as  if  I  had  found  the  door  of  para- 
dise thrown  wide  open."  ^  This  sense  of  deeper  significance 
is  not  confined  to  rational  propositions.  Single  words,^  and 

^  Newman's  Securus  judicat  orbis  terrarum  is  another  instance. 

2  "Mesopotamia"  is  the  stock  comic  instance. — An  excellent  old 
German  lady,  who  had  done  some  traveling  in  her  day,  used  to  de- 
scribe to  me  her  Sehtisucht  that  she  might  yet  visit  "Philadelphia," 
whose  wondrous  name  had  always  haunted  her  imagination.  Of  John 
Foster  it  is  said  that  "single  words  (as  chalcedony) ,  or  the  names  of 
ancient  heroes,  had  a  mighty  fascination  over  him.  'At  any  time  the 
word  hermit  was  enough  to  transport  him.'  The  wcwrds  woods  and 
forests  would  produce  the  most  powerful  emotion."  Foster's  Life,  by 
Ryland,  New  York,  1846,  p.  3. 


-574       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

conjunctions  of  words,  effects  of  light  on  land  and  sea,  odors 
and  musical  sounds,  all  bring  it  when  the  mind  is  tuned 
aright.  Most  of  us  can  remember  the  strangely  moving 
power  of  passages  in  certain  poems  read  when  we  were 
young,  irrational  doorways  as  they  were  through  which  the 
mystery  of  fact,  the  wildness  and  the  pang  of  life,  stole  into 
our  hearts  and  thrilled  them.  The  words  have  now  perhaps 
become  mere  polished  surfaces  for  us;  but  lyric  poetry  and 
music  are  alive  and  significant  only  in  proportion  as  they 
fetch  these  vague  vistas  of  a  life  continuous  with  our  own, 
beckoning  and  inviting,  yet  ever  eluding  our  pursuit.  We 
are  alive  or  dead  to  the  eternal  inner  message  of  the  arts 
according  as  we  have  kept  or  lost  this  mystical  susceptibility. 
A  more  pronounced  step  forward  on  the  mystical  ladder 
is  found  in  an  extremely  frequent  phenomenon,  that  sudden 
reeling,  namely,  which  sometimes  sweeps  over  us,  of  hav- 
ing "been  here  before,"  as  if  at  some  indefinite  past  time,  in 
iust  this  place,  with  just  these  people,  we  were  already  say- 
ing just  these  things.  As  Tennyson  writes: 

"Moreover,  something  is  or  seems 
That  touches  me  with  mystic  gleams, 
Like  glimpses  of  forgotten  dreams — 

"Of  something  felt,  like  something  here; 
Of  something  done,  I  know  not  where; 
Such  as  no  language  may  declare."  ^ 

^  The  Two  Voices.  In  a  letter  to  Mr.  B.  P.  Blood,  Tennyson  reports 
of  himself  as  follows: — 

"I  have  never  had  any  revelations  through  ansesthetics,  but  a  kind 
of  waking  trance — this  for  lack  of  a  better  word — I  have  frequently 
had,  quite  up  frorri  boyhood,  when  I  have  been  all  alone.  This  has 
come  upon  me  through  repeating  my  own  name  to  myself  silendy, 
dll  all  at  once,  as  it  were  out  of  the  intensity  of  the  consciousness  of 
individuality,  individuality  itself  seemed  to  dissolve  and  fade  away 
into  boundless  being,  and  this  not  a  confused  state  but  the  clearest, 
the  surest  of  the  sufi^/t,  utterly  beyond  words — where  death  was  an 


MYSTICISM  375 

Sir  James  Crichton-Browne  has  given  the  technical  name 
of  "dreamy  states"  to  these  sudden  invasions  of  vaguely 
reminiscent  consciousness.^  They  brin-g  a  sense  of  mystery 
and  of  the  metaphysical  duality  of  things,  and  the  feeling 
of  an  enlargement  of  perception  which  seems  imminent  but 
which  never  completes  itself.  In  Dr.  Crichton-Browne's 
opinion  they  connect  themselves  with  the  perplexed  and 
scared  disturbances  of  self-consciousness  which  occasionally 
precede  epileptic  attacks.  I  Lhink  that  this  learned  alienisi 
takes  a  rather  absurdly  alarmist  view  of  an  intrinsically  in- 
significant phenomenon.  He  follows  it  along  the  downward 
ladder,  to  insanity;  our  path  pursues  the  upward  ladder 
chiefly.  The  divergence  shows  how  important  it  is  to  neglect 
no  part  of  a  phenomenon's  connections,  for  we  make  it  ap- 
pear admirable  or  dreadful  according  to  the  context  by  which 
we  set  it  of?. 

Somewhat  deeper  plunges  into  mystical  consciousness  are 
met  with  in  yet  other  dreamy  states.  Such  feelings  as  these 
which  Charles  Kingsley  describes  are  surely  far  from  being 
uncommon,  especially  in  youth: — 

"When  I  walk  the  fields,  I  am  oppressed  now  and  then  with 
an  innate  feeling  that  everything  I  see  has  a  meaning,  if  I  could 
but  understand  it.  And  this  feeling  of  being  surrounded  with 
truths  which  I  cannot  grasp  amounts  to  indescribable  awe  some- 

almost  laughable  impossibility — the  loss  of  personality  (if  so  it  were) 
seeming  no  extinction,  but  the  only  true  life.  I  am  ashamed  of  my 
feeble  description.  Have  I  not  said  the  state  is  utterly  beyond  words?" 
Professor  Tyndall,  in  a  letter,  recalls  Tennyson  saying  of  this  con- 
didon:  "By  God  Almighty!  there  is  no  delusion  in  the  matter!  It  is 
no  nebulous  ecstasy,  but  a  state  of  transcendent  wonder,  associated 
with  absolute  clearness  of  mind."  Memoirs  of  Alfred  Tennyson,  ii. 

473- 

^  The  Lancet,  July  6  and  13,  1895,  reprinted  as  the  Cavendish  Lec- 
ture, on  Dreamy  Mental  States,  London,  Bailliere,  1895.  They  have 
been  a  good  deal  discussed  of  late  by  psychologists.  See,  for  example, 
Bernard-Leroy:  L'lllusion  de  Faussc  Reconnaissance,  Paris,  1898. 


376       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

times.  .  .  .  Have  you  not  felt  that  your  real  soul  was  imper- 
ceptible to  your  mental  vision,  except  in  a  few  hallowed  mo- 
ments?" ^ 

A  much  more  extreme  state  of  mystical  consciousness  is 
described  by  J.  A.  Symonds;  and  probably  more  persons 
than  we  suspect  could  give  parallels  to  it  from  their  own 
experience. 

"Suddenly,"  writes  Symonds,  "at  church,  or  in  company,  or 
when  I  was  reading,  and  always,  I  think,  when  my  muscles  were 
at  rest,  I  felt  the  approach  of  the  mood.  Irresistibly  it  took  pos- 
session of  my  mind  and  will,  lasted  what  seemed  an  eternity, 
and  disappeared  in  a  series  of  rapid  sensations  which  resembled 
the  awakening  from  ansesthetic  influence.  One  reason  why  I  dis- 
liked this  kind  of  trance  was  that  I  could  not  describe  it  to  my- 
self. I  cannot  even  now  find  words  to  render  it  mtelligible.  It 
consisted  in  a  gradual  but  swiftly  progressive  obliteration  of 
space,  time,  sensation,  and  the  multitudinous  factors  of  experi- 
ence which  seem  to  qualify  what  we  are  pleased  to  call  our  Self. 
In  proportion  as  these  conditions  of  ordinary  consciousness  were 
subtracted,  the  sense  of  an  underlying  or  essential  consciousness 
acquired  intensity.  At  last  nothing  remained  but  a  pure,  abso- 
lute, abstract  Self.  The  universe  became  without  form  and  void 
of  content.  But  Self  persisted,  formidable  in  its  vivid  keenness, 
feeling  the  most  poignant  doubt  about  reality,  ready,  as  it 
seemed,  to  find  existence  break  as  breaks  a  bubble  round  about 
it.  And  what  then?  The  apprehension  of  a  coming  dissolution, 
the  grim  conviction  that  this  state  was  the  last  state  of  the  con- 
scious Self,  the  sense  that  I  had  followed  the  last  thread  of  being 
to  the  verge  of  the  abyss,  and  had  arrived  at  demonstration  of 
eternal  Maya  or  illusion,  stirred  or  seemed  to  stir  me  up  again. 
The  return  to  ordinary  conditions  of  sentient  existence  began 
by  my  first  recovering  the  power  of  touch,  and  then  by  the  grad- 
ual though  rapid  influx  of  familiar  impressions  and  diurnal  in- 
terests. At  last  I  felt  myself  once  more  a  human  being;  and 

1  Charles  Kingsley's  Life,  i.  55,  quoted  by  Inge:  Christian  Mysti- 
cism, London,  1899,  p.  341. 


MYSTICISM  377 

though  the  riddle  of  what  is  meant  by  Ufe  remained  unsolved, 
I  was  thankful  for  this  return  from  the  abyss — this  deliverance 
from  so  awful  an  initiation  into  the  mysteries  of  skepticism. 

"This  trance  recurred  with  diminishing  frequency  until  I 
reached  the  age  of  twenty-eight.  It  served  to  impress  upon  my 
growing  nature  the  phantasmal  unreality  of  all  the  circum- 
stances which  contribute  to  a  merely  phenomenal  consciousness. 
Often  have  I  asked  myself  with  anguish,  on  waking  from  that 
formless  state  of  denuded,  keenly  sentient  being,  Which  is  the 
unreality — the  trance  of  fiery,  vacant,  apprehensive,  skeptical 
Self  from  which  I  issue,  or  these  surrounding  phenomena  and 
habits  which  veil  that  inner  Self  and  build  a  self  of  flesh-and- 
blood  conventionality?  Again,  are  men  the  factors  of  some 
dream,  the  dream-like  unsubstantiality  of  which  they  compre- 
hend at  such  eventful  moments.''  What  would  happen  if  the 
final  stage  of  the  trance  were  reached.^"  ^ 

In  a  recital  like  this  there  is  certainly  something  sugges- 
tive of  pathology."  The  next  step  into  mystical  states  carries 
us  into  a  realm  that  public  opinion  and  ethical  philosophy 
have  long  since  branded  as  pathological,  though  private 
practice  and  certain  lyric  strains  of  poetry  seem  still  to  bear 
witness  to  its  ideality.  I  refer  to  the  consciousness  produced 
by  intoxicants  and  anaesthetics,  especially  by  alcohol.  The 
sway  of  alcohol  over  mankind  is  unquestionably  due  to  its 
power  to  stimulate  the  mystical  faculties  of  human  nature, 
usually  crushed  to  earth  by  the  cold  facts  and  dry  criticisms 
of  the  sober  hour.  Sobriety  diminishes,  discriminates,  and 

^  H.  F.  Brown:  J.  A.  Symonds,  a  Biography,  London,  1895,  pp. 
29-31,  abridged. 

-  Crichton-Browne  expressly  says  that  Symonds's  "highest  nerve 
centres  were  in  some  degree  enfeebled  or  damaged  by  these  dreamy 
mental  states  which  afflicted  him  so  grievously."  Symonds  was,  how- 
ever, a  perfect  monster  of  many-sided  cerebral  efficiency,  and  his 
critic  gives  no  objective  grounds  whatever  for  his  strange  opinion, 
save  that  Symonds  complained  occasionally,  as  all  susceptible  and 
ambitious  men  complain,  of  lassitude  and  uncertainty  as  to  his  life's 
mission. 


378       1HE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

says  no;  drunkenness  expands,  unites,  and  says  yes.  It  is  in 
fact  the  great  exciter  of  the  Yes  function  in  man.  It  brings 
its  votary  from  the  chill  periphery  of  things  to  the  radiant 
core.  It  makes  him  for  the  moment  one  with  truth.  Not 
through  mere  perversity  do  men  run  after  it.  To  the  poor 
and  the  unlettered  it  stands  in  the  place  of  symphony  con- 
certs and  of  literature;  and  it  is  part  of  the  deeper  mystery 
and  tragedy  of  life  that  whifTs  and  gleams  of  something 
that  we  immediately  recognize  as  excellent  should  be  vouch- 
safed to  so  many  of  us  only  in  the  fleeting  earlier  phases  of 
what  in  its  totality  is  so  degrading  a  poisoning.  The 
drunken  consciousness  is  one  bit  of  the  mystic  conscious- 
ness, and  our  total  opinion  of  it  must  find  its  place  in  our 
opinion  of  that  larger  whole. 

Nitrous  oxide  and  ether,  especially  nitrous  oxide,  when 
sufficiently  diluted  with  air,  stimulate  the  mystical  conscious- 
ness in  an  extraordinary  degree.  Depth  beyond  depth  of 
truth  seems .  revealed  to  the  inhaler.  This  truth  fades  out, 
however,  or  escapes,  at  the  moment  of  coming  to;  and  if 
any  words  remain  over  in  which  it  seemed  to  clothe  itself, 
they  prove  to  be  the  veriest  nonsense.  Nevertheless,  the  sense 
of  a  profound  meaning  having  been  there  persists;  and  I 
know  more  than  one  person  who  is  persuaded  that  in  the 
nitrous  oxide  trance  we  have  a  genuine  metaphysical  revela- 
tion. 

Some  years  ago  I  myself  made  some  observations  on  this 
aspect  of  nitrous  oxide  intoxication,  and  reported  them  in 
print.  One  conclusion  was  forced  upon  my  mind  at  that 
time,  and  my  impression  of  its  truth  has  ever  since  re- 
mained unshaken.  It  is  that  our  normal  waking  conscious- 
ness, rational  consciousness  as  we  call  it,  is  but  one  special 
type  of  consciousness,  whilst  all  about  it,  parted  from  it  by 
the  filmiest  of  screens,  there  lie  potential  forms  of  conscious- 
ness entirely  different.  We  may  go  through  life  without 
suspecting  their  existence;  but,  apply  the  requisite  stimulus, 


MYSTICISM  379 

and  at  a  touch  they  are  there  in  all  their  completeness,  defi- 
nite types  of  mentality  which  probably  somewhere  have 
their  field  of  application  and  adaptation.  No  account  of  the 
universe  in  its  totality  can  be  final  which  leaves  these  other 
forms  of  consciousness  quite  disregarded.  How  to  regard 
them  is  the  question— for  they  are  so  discontinuous  with 
ordinary  consciousness.  Yet  they  may  determine  attitudes 
though  they  cannot  furnish  formulas,  and  open  a  region 
though  they  fail  to  give  a  map.  At  any  rate,  they  forbid  a 
premature  closing  of  our  accounts  with  reality.  Looking 
back  on  my  own  experiences,  they  all  converge  towards  a 
kind  of  insight  to  which  I  cannot  help  ascribing  some  meta- 
physical significance.  The  keynote  of  it  is  invariably  a 
reconciliation.  It  is  as  if  the  opposites  of  the  world,  whose 
contradictoriness  and  conflict  make  all  our  difficulties  and 
troubles,  were  melted  into  unity.  Not  only  do  they,  as  con- 
trasted species,  belong  to  one  and  the  same  genus,  but  one 
of  the  species,  the  nobler  and  better  one,  is  itself  the  genus, 
and  so  soa\s  up  and  absorbs  its  opposite  into  itself.  This 
is  a  dark  saying,  I  know,  when  thus  expressed  in  terms  of 
common  logic,  but  I  cannot  wholly  escape  from  its  author- 
ity. I  feel  as  if  it  must  mean  something,  something  like 
what  the  hegehan  philosophy  means,  if  one  could  only  lay 
hold  of  it  more  clearly.  Those  who  have  ears  to  hear,  let 
them  hear;  to  me  the  living  sense  of  its  reality  only  comes 
in  the  artificial  mystic  state  of  mind.-^ 

I  just  now  spoke  of  friends  who  believe  in  the  anesthetic 
revelation.  For  them  too  it  is  a  monistic  insight,  in  which 
the  other  in  its  various  forms  appears  absorbed  into  the  One. 

1  What  reader  of  Hegel  can  doubt  that  that  sense  of  a  perfected 
Being  with  all  its  otherness  soaked  up  into  itself,  vv'hich  dominates 
his  whole  philosophy,  must  have  come  from  the  prominence  in  his 
consciousness  of  mystical  moods  like  this,  in  most  persons  kept  sub- 
liminal? The  notion  is  dioroughly  characteristic  of  the  mysdcal  level, 
and  the  Aufgabe  of  making  it  articulate  was  surely  set  to  Hegel's  in- 
tellect by  mysdcal  feeling. 


380       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

"Into  this  pervading  genius,"  writes  one  of  them,  "we  pass, 
forgetting  and  forgotten,  and  thenceforth  each  is  all,  in  God. 
There  is  no  higher,  no  deeper,  no  other,  than  the  life  in  which 
we  are  founded.  'The  One  remains,  the  many  change  and  pass;' 
and  each  and  every  one  of  us  is  the  One  that  remains.  .  .  , 
This  is  the  ultimatum.  ...  As  sure  as  being — whence  is  all 
our  care — so  sure  is  content,  beyond  duplexity,  antithesis,  or 
trouble,  where  I  have  triumphed  in  a  solitude  that  God  is  not 
above."  ^ 

^  Benjamin  Paul  Blood:  The  Anssthetic  Revelation  and  the  Gist 
of  Philosophy,  Amsterdam,  N.  Y.,  1874,  pp.  35,  36.  Mr.  Blood  has 
made  several  attempts  to  adumbrate  the  anesthetic  revelation,  in 
pamphlets  of  rare  literary  distinction,  privately  printed  and  dis- 
tributed by  himself  at  Amsterdam.  Xenos  Clark,  a  philosopher,  who 
died  young  at  Amherst  in  the  '8o's,  much  lamented  by  those  who 
knew  him,  was  also  impressed  by  the  revelation.  "In  the  first  place," 
he  once  wrote  to  me,  "Mr.  Blood  and  I  agree  that  the  revelation  is, 
if  anything,  non-emotional.  It  is  utterly  flat.  It  is,  as  Mr.  Blood  says, 
'the  one  sole  and  sufficient  insight  why,  or  not  why,  but  how,  the 
present  is  pushed  on  by  the  past,  and  sucked  forward  by  the  vacuity 
of  the  future.  Its  inevitableness  defeats  all  attempts  at  stopping  or  ac- 
coundng  for  it.  It  is  all  precedence  and  presupposition,  and  quesdon- 
ing  is  in  regard  to  it  forever  too  late.  It  is  an  initiation  of  the  past.' 
The  real  secret  would  be  the  formula  by  which  the  'now'  keeps  ex- 
foliating out  of  itself,  yet  never  escapes.  What  is  it,  indeed,  that  keeps 
existence  exfoliating?  The  formal  being  of  anything,  the  logical  defi- 
nition of  it,  is  static.  For  mere  logic  every  question  contains  its  own 
answer — we  simply  fill  the  hole  with  the  dirt  we  dug  out.  Why  are 
twice  two  four?  Because,  in  fact,  four  is  twice  two.  Thus  logic  finds 
m  life  no  propulsion,  only  a  momentum.  It  goes  because  it  is  a-going. 
But  the  revelation  adds:  it  goes  because  it  is  and  was  a-going.  You 
walk,  as  it  were,  round  yourself  in  the  revelation.  Ordinary  phi- 
losophy is  like  a  hound  hunting  his  own  tail.  The  more  he  hunts  the 
farther  he  has  to  go,  and  his  nose  never-  catches  up  with  his  heels, 
because  it  is  forever  ahead  of  them.  So  the  present  is  already  a  fore- 
gone conclusion,  and  I  am  ever  too  late  to  understand  it.  But  at  the 
moment  of  recovery  from  anaesthesis,  just  then,  before  starting  on 
life,  I  catch,  so  to  speak,  a  glimpse  of  my  heels,  a  glimpse  of  the 
eternal  process  just  in  the  act  of  starting.  The  truth  is  that  we  travel 
on  a  journey  that  was  accomplished  before  we  set  out;  and  the  real 
end  of  philosophy  is  accomplished,  not  when  we  arrive  at,  but  when 


1 


MYSTICISM  381 

This  has  the  genuine  reHgious  mystic  ring!  I  just  now 
quoted  J.  A.  Symonds.  He  also  records  a  mystical  expe- 

we  remain  in,  our  destination  (being  already  there) — wliich  may  oc- 
cur vicariously  in  this  life  when  we  cease  our  intellectual  question- 
ing. That  is  why  there  is  a  smile  upon  the  face  of  the  revelation,  as 
we  view  it.  It  tells  us  that  we  are  forever  half  a  second  too  late — 
that's  all.  'You  could  kiss  your  own  lips,  and  have  all  the  fun  to 
yourself,'  it  says,  if  you  only  knev*/  the  U-ick.  It  would  be  perfectly 
easy  if  they  would  just  stay  there  till  you  got  round  to  them.  Why 
don't  you  manage  it  somehow?" 

Dialectically  minded  readers  of  this  farrago  will  at  least  recognize 
the  region  of  thought  of  which  Mr.  Clark  writes,  as  familiar.  In  his 
latest  pamphlet,  "Tennyson's  Trances  and  the  Anaesthetic  Revela- 
tion," Mr.  Blood  describes  its  value  for  life  as  follows: — 

"The  Anaesthetic  Revelation  is  the  Initiation  of  Man  into  the  Im- 
memorial Mystery  of  the  Open  Secret  of  Being,  revealed  as  the  In- 
evitable Vortex  of  Continuity.  Inevitable  is  the  word.  Its  motive  is 
inherent — it  is  what  has  to  be.  It  is  not  for  any  love  or  hate,  nor  for 
joy  nor  sorrow,  nor  good  nor  ill.  End,  beginning,  or  purpose,  it 
knows  not  of. 

"It  affords  no  pardcular  of  the  muldplicity  and  variety  of  things; 
but  it  fills  appreciadon  of  the  historical  and  the  sacred  with  a  secular 
and  intimately  personal  illumination  of  the  nature  and  modve  of 
existence,  which  then  seems  reminiscent — as  if  it  should  have  ap- 
peared, or  shall  yet  appear,  to  every  pardcipant  thereof. 

"Although  it  is  at  first  startling  in  its  solemnity,  it  becomes  directly 
such  a  matter  of  course — so  old-fashioned,  and  so  akin  to  proverbs, 
that  it  inspires  exultation  rather  than  fear,  and  a  sense  of  safety,  as 
idendfied  with  the  aboriginal  and  the  universal.  But  no  words  may 
express  the  imposing  certainty  of  the  padent  that  he  is  realizing  the 
primordial,  Adamic  surprise  of  Life. 

"Repeddon  of  the  experience  finds  it  ever  the  same,  and  as  if  it 
could  not  possibly  be  otherwise.  The  subject  resumes  his  normal  con- 
sciousness only  to  pardally  and  fitfully  remember  its  occurrence,  and 
to  try  to  formulate  its  baffling  import — with  only  this  consolatory 
afterthought:  that  he  has  known  the  oldest  truth,  and  that  he  has 
done  with  human  theories  as  to  the  origin,  meaning,  or  desdny  of 
the  race.  He  is  beyond  instruction  in  'spiritual  things.' 

"The  lesson  is  one  of  central  safety:  the  Kingdom  is  within.  All 
days  are  judgment  days:  but  there  can  be  no  climacteric  purpose  of 
eternity,  nor  any  scheme  of  the  whole.  The  astronomer  abridges  the 
row  of  bewildering  figures  by  increasing  his  unit  of  measurement: 


382       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

rience  with  chloroform,  as  follows: — 

"After  the  choking  and  stifling  had  passed  away,  I  seemed  at 
nrst  in  a  state  of  utter  blankness;  then  came  flashes  of  intense 
light,  alternating  with  blackness,  and  with  a  keen  vision  of  what 
was  going  on  in  the  room  around  me,  but  no  sensation  of  touch. 
(  thought  that  I  was  near  death;  when,  suddenly,  my  soul  be- 
came aware  of  God,  who  was  manifesdy  dealing  with  me,  han- 
dling me,  so  to  speak,  in  an  intense  personal  present  reality.  I 
felt  him  streaming  in  like  light  upon  mc.  ...  I  cannot  de- 
scribe the  ecstasy  I  felt.  Then,  as  I  gradually  awoke  from  the  in- 
fluence of  the  anesthetics,  the  eld  sense  of  my  relation  to  the 
world  began  to  return,  the  new  sense  of  my  relation  to  God  be- 
gan to  fade.  I  suddenly  leapt  to  my  feet  on  the  chair  where  I  was 
sitting,  and  shrieked  out,  'It  is  too  horrible,  it  is  too  horrible,  it 
is  too  horrible,'  meaning  that  I  could  not  bear  this  disillusion- 
ment. Then  I  flung  myself  on  the  ground,  and  at  last  awoke 
covered  with  blood,  calling  to  the  two  surgeons  (who  were 
frightened),  'Why  did  you  not  kill  me?  Why  would  you  not 
let  me  die?'  Only  think  of  it.  To  have  felt  for  that  long  dateless 
ecstasy  of  vision  the  very  God,  in  all  purity  and  tenderness  and 
truth  and  absolute  love,  and  then  to  find  that  I  had  after  all  had 
no  revelation,  but  that  I  had  been  tricked  by  the  abnormal  ex- 
citement of  my  brain. 

"Yet,  this  question  remains,  Is  it  possible  that  the  inner  sense 
of  reality  which  succeeded,  when  my  flesh  was  dead  to  impres- 

so  may  we  reduce  the  distracting  multiplicity  of  things  to  the  unit>' 
fcr  which  each  of  us  stands. 

"This  has  been  my  moral  sustenance  since  I  have  known  of  it.  In 
my  first  printed  mention  of  it  I  declared:  'The  world  is  no  more  the 
alien  terror  that  was  taught  me.  Spurning  the  cloud-grimed  and  still 
sultry  batdements  whence  so  lately  lehovan  thunders  boomed,  my 
gray  gull  lifts  her  wing  against  the  nightfall,  and  takes  the  dim 
leagues  with  a  fearless  eye.'  And  now,  after  twenty-se\en  years  of 
this  experience,  the  wing  is  grayer,  but  the  eye  is  fearless  still,  while 
I  renew  and  doubly  emphasize  that  declaradon.  I  know — as  having 
known — the  meaning  of  Existence:  the  sane  centre  of  the  universe — 
at  once  the  wonder  and  the  assurance  of  the  soul — for  which  the 
speech  of  reason  has  as  yet  no  name  but  the  Anaesthetic  Reveladon." 
—I  have  considerably  abridged  the  quotation. 


1 


MYSTICISM  383 

sions  from  without,  to  the  ordinary  sense  of  physical  relations, 
was  not  a  delusion  but  an  actual  experience?  Is  it  possible  that 
I,  in  that  moment,  felt  what  some  of  the  saints  have  said  they 
always  felt,  the  undemonstrable  but  irrefragable  certainty  of 
God?"i 

^  Op.  cit.,  pp.  78-80,  abridged.  I  subjoin,  also  abridging  it,  another 
interesting  anesthetic  revelation  communicated  to  me  in  manuscript 
by  a  friend  in  England.  The  subject,  a  gifted  woman,  was  taking 
ether  for  a  surgical  operadon. 

"I  wondered  if  I  was  in  a  prison  being  tortured,  and  why  I  re- 
membered having  heard  it  said  that  people  'learn  through  suffering,' 
and  in  view  of  what  I  was  seeing,  the  inadequacy  of  this  saying 
struck  me  so  much  that  I  said,  aloud,  'to  suffer  is  to  learn.' 

"With  that  I  became  unconscious  again,  and  my  last  dream  imme- 
diately preceded  my  real  coming  to.  It  only  lasted  a  few  seconds,  and 
was  most  vivid  and  real  to  me,  though  it  may  not  be  clear  in  words. 

"A  great  Being  or  Power  was  traveling  through  the  sky,  his  foot 
was  on  a  kind  of  lightning  as  a  wheel  is  on  a  rail,  it  was  his  path- 
way. The  lightning  was  made  endrely  of  the  spirits  of  innumerable 
people  close  to  one  another,  and  I  was  one  of  them.  He  moved  in  a 
straight  line,  and  each  part  of  the  streak  or  flash  came  into  its  short 
conscious  existence  only  that  he  might  travel.  I  seemed  to  be  directly 
under  the  foot  of  God,  and  I  thought  he  was  grinding  his  own  life 
up  out  of  my  pain.  Then  I  saw  that  what  he  had  been  trying  with 
all  his  might  to  do  was  to  change  his  course,  to  bend  the  line  of  light- 
ning to  which  he  was  ded,  in  the  direction  in  which  he  wanted  to  go. 
I  felt  my  flexibility  and  helplessness,  and  knew  that  he  would  suc- 
ceed. He  bended  me,  mrning  his  corner  by  means  of  my  hurt,  hurt- 
ing me  more  than  I  had  ever  been  hurt  in  my  life,  and  at  the  acutest 
point  of  this,  as  he  passed,  I  saw.  I  understood  for  a  moment  things 
that  I  have  now  forgotten,  things  that  no  one  could  remember  while 
retaining  sanity.  The  angle  was  an  obtuse  angle,  and  I  remember 
thinking  as  I  woke  that  had  he  made  it  a  right  or  acute  angle,  I 
should  have  both  suffered  and  'seen'  still  more,  and  should  probably 
have  died. 

"He  went  on  and  I  came  to.  In  that  moment  the  whole  of  my  life 
passed  before  me,  including  each  little  meaningless  piece  of  distress, 
and  I  understood  them.  This  was  what  it  had  all  meant,  this  was 
the  piece  of  work  it  had  all  been  contributing  to  do.  I  did  not  see 
God's  purpose,  I  only  saw  his  intentness  and  his  endre  relendessness 
towards  his  means.  He  thought  no  more  of  me  than  a  man  thinks  of 
hurdng  a  cork  when  he  is  opening  wine,  or  hurdng  a  cartridge  when 


384       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

With  this  we  make  connection  with  religious  mysticism 
pure  and  simple.  Symonds's  question  takes  us  back  to  those 
examples  which  you  will  remember  my  quoting  in  the  lec- 
ture on  the  Reality  of  the  Unseen,  of  sudden  realization  of 
(he  immediate  presence  of  God.  The  phenomenon  in  one 
iihape  or  another  is  not  uncommon. 

he  is  firing.  And  yet,  on  waking,  my  first  feeling  was,  and  it  came 
with  tears,  'Domine  non  sum  digna,'  for  I  had  been  lifted  into  a  posi- 
tion for  which  I  was  too  small.  I  realized  that  in  that  half  hour  under 
ether  I  had  served  God  more  disdnctly  and  purely  than  I  had  ever 
done  in  my  life  before,  or  than  I  am  capable  of  desiring  to  do.  I  was 
the  means  of  his  achieving  and  revealing  something,  I  know  not 
what  or  to  whom,  and  that,  to  the  exact  extent  of  my  capacity  for 
juffering. 

"While  regaining  consciousness,  I  wondered  why,  since  I  had  gone 
fo  deep,  I  had  seen  nothing  of  what  the  saints  call  the  love  of  God, 
nothing  but  his  relendessness.  And  then  I  heard  an  answer,  which  I 
lould  only  just  catch,  saying,  'Knowledge  and  Love  are  One,  and  die 
measure  is  suffering' — I  give  the  words  as  they  came  to  me.  With  that 
I  came  finally  to  (into  what  seemed  a  dream  world  compared  with 
the  reality  of  what  I  was  leaving),  and  I  saw  that  what  would  be 
called  the  'cause'  of  iny  experience  was  a  slight  operation  under  in- 
sufficient ether,  in  a  bed  pushed  up  against  a  window,  a  common  city 
window  in  a  common  city  street.  If  I  had  to  formulate  a  few  of  the 
things  I  then  caught  a  glimpse  of,  they  would  run  somewhat  as  fol- 
lows:— 

"The  eternal  necessity  of  suffering  and  its  eternal  vicariousness. 
The  veiled  and  incommunicable  nature  of  the  worst  sufferings; — the 
passivity  of  genius,  how  it  is  essendally  instrumental  and  defense- 
less, moved,  not  moving,  it  must  do  what  it  does; — the  impossibility 
of  discovery  without  its  price; — finally,  the  excess  of  what  the  suffer- 
ing 'seer'  or  genius  pays  over  what  his  generadon  gains.  (He  seems 
like  one  who  sweats  his  life  out  to  earn  enough  to  save  a  district 
from  famine,  and  just  as  he  staggers  back,  dying  and  sadsfied,  bring- 
ing a  lac  of  rupees  to  buy  grain  with,  God  lifts  the  lac  away,  dropping 
072(?  rupee,  and  says,  'That  you  may  give  them.  That  you  have  earned 
for  them.  The  rest  is  for  ME.')  I  perceived  also  in  a  way  never  to  be 
forgotten,  the  excess  of  what  we  see  over  what  we  can  demonstrate. 

"And  so  on! — these  things  may  seem  to  you  delusions,  or  truisms: 
but  for  me  they  are  dark  truths,  and  the  power  to  put  them  intcj 
<ven  such  words  as  these  has  been  given  me  by  an  ether  dream." 


MYSTICISM  385 

"I  know,"  writes  Mr.  Trine,  "an  officer  on  our  police  force 
who  has  told  me  that  many  times  when  off  duty,  and  on  his 
way  home  in  the  evening,  there  comes  to  him  such  a  vivid  and 
vital  realization  of  his  oneness  with  this  Infinite  Power,  and  this 
Spirit  of  Infinite  Peace  so  takes  hold  of  and  so  fills  him,  that  it 
seems  as  if  his  feet  could  hardly  keep  to  the  pavement,  so  buoy- 
ant and  so  exhilarated  does  he  become  by  reason  of  this  inflow- 
ing tide."  ^ 

Certain  aspects  of  nature  seem  to  have  a  peculiar  power 
of  awakening  such  mystical  moods.^  Most  of  the  striking 

^  In  Tune  with  the  Infinite,  p.  137. 

-  The  larger  God  may  then  swallow  up  the  smaller  one.  I  take  this 
from  Starbuck's  manuscript  collection: — 

"I  never  lost  the  consciousness  of  the  presence  of  God  until  I  stooil 
at  the  foot  of  the  Horseshoe  Falls,  Niagara.  Then  I  lost  him  in  the 
immensity  of  what  I  saw.  I  also  lost  myself,  feeling  that  I  was  an 
atom  too  small  for  the  notice  of  Almighty  God." 

I  subjoin  another  similar  case  from  Starbuck's  collection: — 

"In  that  time  the  consciousness  of  God's  nearness  came  to  mc 
sometimes.  I  say  God,  to  describe  what  is  indescribable.  A  presence, 
.1  might  say,  yet  that  is  too  suggestive  of  personality,  and  the  moments 
of  which  I  speak  did  not  hold  the  consciousness  of  a  personality,  but 
something  in  myself  made  me  feel  myself  a  part  of  something  bigger 
than  I,  that  was  controlling.  I  felt  myself  one  with  the  grass,  the 
trees,  birds,  insects,  everything  in  Nature.  I  exulted  in  the  mere  fact 
of  existence,  of  being  a  part  of  it  all — the  drizzling  rain,  the  shadows 
of  the  clouds,  the  tree-trunks,  and  so  on.  In  the  years  following,  such 
moments  continued  to  come,  but  I  wanted  them  constandy.  I  knew 
so  well  the  satisfaction  of  losing  self  in  a  perception  of  supreme  power 
and  love,  that  I  was  unhappy  because  that  perception  was  not  con- 
stant." The  cases  quoted  in  my  third  lecture,  p>p.  65,  66,  69,  are  still 
better  ones  of  this  type.  In  her  essay.  The  Loss  of  Personality,  in  The 
Adantic  Monthly  (vol.  Ixxxv.  p.  195),  Miss  Ethel  D.  Puffer  explains 
that  the  vanishing  of  the  sense  of  self,  and  the  feeling  of  immediate 
unity  with  the  object,  is  due  to  the  disappearance,  in  tliese  rapturous 
experiences,  of  the  motor  adjustments  which  habitually  intermediate 
between  the  constant  background  of  consciousness  (which  is  the 
Self)  and  the  object  in  the  foreground,  whatever  it  may  be.  I  must 
refer  the  reader  to  the  highly  instructive  article,  which  seems  to  m" 
to  throw  light  upon  the  psychological  condidons,  though  it  fails  t/ 


386       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

cases  which  I  have  collected  have  occurred  out  of  doors.  Lit- 
erature has  commemorated  this  fact  in  many  passages  of 
great  beauty — this  extract,  for  example,  from  Amiel's  Jour- 
nal Intime: — 

"Shall  I  ever  again  have  any  of  those  prodigious  reveries 
which  sometimes  came  to  me  in  former  days?  One  day,  in  youth, 
at  sunrise,  sitting  in  the  riiins  of  the  castle  of  Faucigny;  and 
again  in  the  mountains,  under  the  noonday  sun,  above  Lavey, 
lying  at  the  foot  of  a  tree  and  visited  by  three  butterflies;  once 
more  at  night  upon  the  shingly  shore  of  the  Northern  Ocean, 
my  back  upon  the  sand  and  my  vision  ranging  through  the 
milky  way; — such  grand  and  spacious,  immortal,  cosmogonic 
reveries,  when  one  reaches  to  the  stars,  when  one  owns  the  in- 
nite!  Moments  divine,  ecstatic  hours;  in  which  our  thought  flies 
from  world  to  world,  pierces  the  great  enigma,  breathes  with  a 
respiration  broad,  tranquil,  and  deep  as  the  respiration  of  the 
ocean,  serene  and  limitless  as  the  blue  firmament;  .  .  .  instants 
of  irresistible  intuition  in  which  one  feels  one's  self  great  as  the 
universe,  and  calm  as  a  god.  .  .  .  What  hours,  what  mem- 
ories! The  vestiges  they  leave  behind  are  enough  to  fill  us  with 
belief  and  enthusiasm,  as  if  they  were  visits  of  the  Holy 
Ghost."  1 

Here  is  a  similar  record  from  the  memoirs  of  that  inter- 
esting German  idealist,  Malwida  von  Meysenbug: — 

"I  was  alone  upon  the  seashore  as  all  these  thoughts  flowed 
over  me,  liberating  and  reconciling;  and  now  again,  as  once  be- 
fore in  distant  days  in  the  Alps  of  Dauphine,  I  was  impelled  to 
kneel  down,  this  time  before  the  illimitable  ocean,  symbol  of  the 
Infinite.  I  felt  that  I  prayed  as  I  had  never  prayed  before,  and 
knew  now  what  prayer  really  is:  to  return  from  the  solitude  of 
individuation  into  the  consciousness  of  unity  with  all  that  is,  to 
kneel  down  as  one  that  passes  away,  and  to  rise  up  as  one  im- 

account  for  the  lapture  or  the  revelation-value  of  the  experience  in 
the  Subject's  eyes. 
1  Op.  cit.,  i.  43-44. 


MYSTICISM  387 

perishable.  Earth,  heaven,  and  sea  resounded  as  in  one  va<.t 
world-encirchng  harmony.  It  was  as  if  the  chorus  of  all  the  grest 
who  had  ever  lived  were  about  me.  I  felt  myself  one  with  them, 
and  it  appeared  as  if  I  heard  their  greeting:  'Thou  too  belongest 
to  the  company  of  those  who  overcome.'  "  ^ 

The  well  known  passage  from  Walt  Whitman  is  a  classi- 
cal expression  of  this  sporadic  type  of  mystical  experience. 

"I  believe  in  you,  my  Soul  ... 

Loaf  with  me  on  the  grass,  loose  the  stop  from  your  throat;  .  .  . 

Only  the  lull  I  like,  the  hum  of  your  valved  voice. 

I  mind  how  once  we  lay,  such  a  transparent  summer  morning. 

Swiftly  arose  and  spread  around  me  the  peace  and  knowledge 

that  pass  all  the  argument  of  the  earth, 
And  I  know  that  the  hand  of  God  is  the  promise  of  my  own, 
And  I  know  that  the  spirit  of  God  is  the  brother  of  my  own. 
And  that  all  the  men  ever  born  are  also  my  brothers  and  the 

women  my  sisters  and  lovers, 
And  that  a  kelson  of  the  creation  is  love."  ^ 

1  could  easily  give  more  instances,  but  one  will  suffice.  I 
take  it  from  the  Autobiography  of  J.  Trevor.^ 

^  Memoiren  einer  Idealistin,  5te  Auflage,  1900,  iii.  166.  For  years 
she  had  been  unable  to  pray,  owing  to  materialistic  belief. 

2  Whitman  in  another  place  expresses  in  a  quieter  way  what  was 
probably  with  him  a  chronic  mystical  perception:  "There  is,"  he 
writes,  "apart  from  mere  intellect,  in  the  make-up  of  every  superior 
human  identity,  a  wondrous  something  that  realizes  without  argu- 
ment, frequently  without  what  is  called  education  (though  I  think  il 
the  goal  and  apex  of  all  education  deserving  the  name),  an  intuidon 
of  the  absolute  balance,  in  time  and  space,  of  the  whole  of  this  multi- 
fariousness, this  revel  of  fools,  and  incredible  make-believe  and  gen- 
eral unsettledness,  we  call  the  world;  a  soul-sight  of  that  divine  clue 
and  unseen  thread  which  holds  the  whole  congeries  of  things,  alj 
history  and  dme,  and  all  events,  however  trivial,  however  mo- 
mentous, like  a  leashed  dog  in  the  hand  of  the  hunter.  [Of]  such 
soul-sight  and  root-centre  for  the  mind  mere  opdmism  explains  onl^ 
the  surface."  Whitman  charges  it  against  Carlyle  that  he  lacked  this 
perception.  Specimen  Days  and  Collect,  Philadelphia,  1882,  p.  174. 

^  My  Quest  for  God,  London,  1897,  pp.  268,  269,  abridged. 


388       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

"One  brilliant  Sunday  morning,  my  wife  and  boys  went  to 
the  Unitarian  Chapel  in  Macclesfield.  I  felt  it  impossible  to  ac- 
company them — as  though  to  leave  the  sunshine  on  the  hills, 
and  go  down  there  to  the  chapel,  would  be  for  the  time  an  act 
of  spiritual  suicide.  And  I  felt  such  need  for  new  inspiration 
and  expansion  in  my  life.  So,  very  reluctantly  and  sadly,  I  left 
my  wife  and  boys  to  go  down  into  the  town,  while  I  went  fur- 
ther up  into  the  hills  with  my  stick  and  my  dog.  In  the  loveli- 
ness of  the  morning,  and  the  beauty  of  the  hills  and  valleys,  I 
soon  lost  my  sense  of  sadness  and  regret.  For  nearly  an  hour  I 
walked  along  the  road  to  the  'Cat  and  Fiddle,'  and  then  re- 
turned. On  the  way  back,  suddenly,  without  warning,  I  felt  that 
I  was  in  Heaven — an  inward  state  of  peace  and  joy  and  assur- 
ance indescribably  intense,  accompanied  with  a  sense  of  being 
bathed  in  a  warm  glow  of  light,  as  though  the  external  condition 
had  brought  about  the  internal  effect — a  feeling  of  having 
passed  beyond  the  body,  though  the  scene  around  me  stood  out 
more  clearly  and  as  if  nearer  to  me  than  before,  by  reason  of  the 
illumination  in  the  midst  of  which  I  seemed  to  be  placed.  This 
deep  emotion  lasted,  though  with  decreasing  strength,  until  I 
reached  home,  and  for  some  time  after,  only  gradually  passing 
away." 

The  writer  adds  that  having  had  further  experiences  of  a 
"limilar  sort,  he  now  knows  them  well, 

"The  spiritual  life,"  he  writes,  "justifies  itself  to  those  who  live 
It;  but  what  can  we  say  to  those  who  do  not  understand?  This, 
It  least,  we  can  say,  that  it  is  a  life  whose  experiences  are  proved 
teal  to  their  possessor,  because  they  remain  with  him  when 
brought  closest  into  contact  with  the  objective  realities  of  life. 
Dreams  cannot  stand  this  test.  We  wake  from  them  to  find  that 
ihey  are  but  dreams.  Wanderings  of  an  overwrought  brain  do 
not  stand  this  test.  These  highest  experiences  that  I  have  had  of 
God's  presence  have  been  rare  and  brief — flashes  of  conscious- 
ness which  have  compelled  me  to  exclaim  with  surprise — God 
is  here! — or  conditions  of  exaltation  and  insight,  less  intense,  and 
only  gradually  passing  away.  I  have  severely  questioned  the 
worth  of  these  moments.  To  no  soul  have  I  named  them,  lest  I 


MYSTICISM  381^ 

should  be  building  my  life  and  work  on  mere  phantasies  of  the 
brain.  But  I  find  that,  after  every  questioning  and  test,  they 
stand  out  to-day  as  the  most  real  experiences  of  my  life,  and  ex- 
periences which  have  explained  and  justified  and  unified  all  past 
experiences  and  all  past  growth.  Indeed,  their  reality  and  their 
far-reaching  significance  are  ever  becoming  more  clear  and 
evident.  When  they  came,  I  was  living  the  fullest,  strongest, 
sanest,  deepest  life.  I  was  not  seeking  them.  What  I  was  seeking, 
with  resolute  determination,  was  to  live  more  intensely  my  own 
life,  as  against  what  I  knew  would  be  the  adverse  judgment  of 
the  world.  It  was  in  the  most  real  seasons  that  the  Real  Presence 
came,  and  I  was  aware  that  I  was  immersed  in  the  infinite  ocean 
of  God."  1 

Even  the  least  mystical  of  you  must  by  this  time  be  con- 
vinced of  the  existence  of  mystical  moments  as  states  of 
consciousness  of  an  entirely  specific  quality,  and  of  the  deep 
impression  which  they  make  on  those  who  have  them.  A 
Canadian  psychiatrist,  Dr.  R.  M.  Bucke,  gives  to  the  more 
distinctly  characterized  of  these  phenomena  the  name  of 
cosmic  consciousness.  "Cosmic  consciousness  in  its  more 
striking  instances  is  not,"  Dr.  Bucke  says,  "simply  an  ex- 
pansion or  extension  of  the  self-conscious  mind  with  v^'hich 
we  are  all  familiar,  but  the  superaddition  of  a  function  as 
distinct  from  any  possessed  by  the  average  man  as  self- 
consciousness  is  distinct  from  any  function  possessed  by  one 
of  the  higher  animals." 

"The  prime  characteristic  of  cosmic  consciousness  is  a  con- 
sciousness  of  the  cosmos,  that  is,  of  the  life  and  order  of  the 
universe.  Along  with  the  consciousness  of  the  cosmos  there  oc- 
curs an  intellectual  enlightenment  which  alone  would  place  the 
individual  on  a  new  plane  of  existence — would  make  him  al- 
most a  member  of  a  new  species.  To  this  is  added  a  state  of 
moral  exaltation,  an  indescribable  feeling  of  elevation,  elation, 
and  joyousness,  and  a  quickening  of  the  moral  sense,  which  is 

1  Op.  cit.,  pp.  256,  257,  abridged. 


390      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

fully  as  strikinfT,  and  more  important  than  is  the  enhanced  in- 
tellectual power.  With  these  come  what  may  be  called  a  sense 
of  immoi-talitv,  a  consciousness  of  eternal  life,  not  a  conviction 
that  he  shall  have  this,  but  the  consciousness  that  he  has  it  al- 
ready." ^ 

It  was  Dr.  Bucke's  own  experience  of  a  typical  onset  of 
cosmic  consciousness  in  his  own  person  which  led  him  to 
investigate  it  in  others.  He  has  printed  his  conclusions  m  a 
highly  interesting  volume,  from  which  I  take  the  following 
account  of  what  occurred  to  him: — 

"I  had  spent  the  evening  in  a  great  city,  with  two  friends, 
reading  and  discussing  poetry  and  philosophy.  We  parted  at 
midnight.  I  had  a  long  drive  in  a  hansom  to  my  lodging.  My 
mind,  deeply  under  the  influence  of  the  ideas,  images,  and  emo- 
tions called  up  by  the  reading  and  talk,  was  calm  and  peaceful. 
I  was  in  a  state  of  quiet,  almost  passive  enjoyment,  not  actually 
thinking,  but  letting  ideas,  images,  and  emotions  flow  of  them- 
selves, as  it  were,  through  my  mind.  All  at  once,  without  warn- 
ing of  any  kind,  I  found  myself  wrapped  in  a  flame-colored 
cloud.  For  an  instant  I  thought  of  fire,  an  immense  conflagra- 
tion somewhere  close  by  in  that  great  city;  the  next,  I  knew 
that  the  fire  was  within  myself.  Direcdy  afterward  there  came 
upon  me  a  sense  of  exultation,  of  immense  joyousness  accom- 
panied or  immediately  followed  by  an  intellectual  illumination 
impossible  to  describe.  Among  other  things,  I  did  not  merely 
come  to  believe,  but  I  saw  that  the  universe  is  not  composed  of 
dead  matter,  but  is,  on  the  contrary,  a  living  Presence;  I  became 
conscious  in  myself  of  eternal  life.  It  was  not  a  conviction  that 
[  would  have  eternal  life,  but  a  consciousness  that  I  possessed 
eternal  life  then;  I  saw  that  all  men  are  immortal;  that  the 
cosmic  order  is  such  that  without  any  peradventure  all  things 
work  together  for  the  good  of  each  and  all;  that  the  foundation 
principle  of  the  world,  of  all  the  worlds,  is  what  we  call  love, 
and  that  the  happiness  of  each  and  all  is  in  the  long  run  abso- 

^  Cosmic  Consciousness:  a  study  in  the  evolution  of  the  human 
Mind,  Philadelphia,  1901,  p.  2. 


MYSTICISM  391 

lutely  certain.  The  vision  lasted  a  few  seconds  and  was  gone 
but  the  memory  of  it  and  the  sense  of  the  reaUty  of  what  it 
taught  has  remained  during  the  quarter  of  a  century  which  has 
since  elapsed.  I  knew  that  what  the  vision  showed  was  true.  I 
had  attained  to  a  point  of  view  from  which  I  saw  that  it  must 
be  true.  That  view,  that  conviction,  I  may  say  that  consciousness, 
has  never,  even  during  periods  of  the  deepest  depression,  been 
lost."  1 

We  have  now  seen  enough  of  this  cosmic  or  mystic  con- 
sciousness, as  it  comes  sporadically.  We  must  next  pass  to 
its  methodical  cultivation  as  an  element  of  the  religious 
life.  Hindus,  Buddhists,  Mohammedans,  and  Christians  all 
have  cultivated  it  methodically. 

In  India,  training  in  mystical  insight  has  been  known 
from  time  immemorial  under  the  name  of  yoga.  Yoga 
means  the  experimental  union  of  the  individual  with  the 
divine.  It  is  based  on  persevering  exercise;  and  the  diet, 
posture,  breathing,  intellectual  concentration,  and  moral 
discipline  vary  slightly  in  the  different  systems  which  teach 
it.  The  yogi,  or  disciple,  who  has  by  these  means  overcome 
the  obscurations  of  his  lower  nature  sufficiently,  enters  into 
the  condition  termed  samddhi,  "and  comes  face  to  face  with 
facts  which  no  instinct  or  reason  can  ever  know."  He 
learns— 

"That  the  mind  itself  has  a  higher  state  of  existence,  beyond 
reason,  a  superconscious  state,  and  that  when  the  mind  gets  to 
that  higher  state,  then  this  knowledge  beyond  reasoning  comes. 
.  .  .  All  the  different  steps  in  yoga  are  intended  to  bring  us 
scientifically  to  the  superconscious  state  cr  Samadhi.  .  .  .  Just 
as  unconscious  work  is  beneath  consciousness,  so  there  is  an- 
other ''vork  which  is  above  consciousness,  and  which,  also,  is  not 
accompanied  with  the  feeling  of  egoism.  .  .  .  There  is  no  feel- 

^  Log.  cit.,  pp.  7,  8.  My  quotation  follows  the  privately  printed  pam- 
phlet which  preceded  Dr.  Bucke's  larger  work,  and  differs  verbally 
a  litde  from  the  text  of  the  latter. 


392       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ing  of  /,  and  yet  the  mind  works,  desireless,  free  from  restless- 
ness, objectless,  bodiless.  Then  the  Truth  shines  in  its  full  efiful- 
gence,  and  we  know  ourselves — for  Samadhi  lies  potential  in 
as  all — for  what  we  truly  are,  free,  immortal,  omnipotent,  loosed 
from  the  finite,  and  its  contrasts  of  good  and  evil  altogether, 
and  identical  with  the  Atman  or  Universal  Soul."  ^ 

The  Vedantists  say  that  one  may  stumble  into  supercon- 
sciousness  sporadically,  without  the  previous  discipline,  but 
it  is  then  impure.  Their  test  of  its  purity,  like  our  test  of 
religion's  value,  is  empirical:  its  fruits  must  be  good  for  life. 
When  a  man  comes  out  of  Samadhi,  they  assure  us  that  he 
remains  "enlightened,  a  sage,  a  prophet,  a  saint,  his  whole 
character  changed,  his  life  changed,  illumined."  ^ 

The  Buddhist.s  used  the  word  "samadhi"  as  well  as  the 
Hindus;  but  "dhyana"  is  their  special  word  for  higher  states 
of  contemplation.  There  seem  to  be  four  stages  recognized 
in  dhyana.  The  first  stage  comes  through  concentration  of 
the  mind  upon  one  point.  It  excludes  desire,  but  not  dis- 
cernment or  judgment:  it  is  still  intellectual.  In  the  second 
stage  the  intellectual  functions  drop  off,  and  the  satisfied 
sense  of  unity  remains.  In  the  third  stage  the  satisfaction 
departs,  and  indifference  begins,  along  Tvith  memory  and 

^  My  quotations  are  from  Vivekananda,  Raja  Yoga,  London,  1896. 
The  comp'etest  source  of  information  on  Yoga  is  the  work  trans- 
lated by  ViHARi  Lala  Mitra:  Yoga  Vasishta  Maha  Ramayana,  4  vols. 
Calcutta,  1891-99. 

^  A  European  witness,  after  carefully  comparing  the  results  of  Yoga 
with  those  of  the  hypnotic  or  dreamy  states  artificially  producible  by 
us,  says:  "It  makes  of  its  true  disciples  good,  healthy,  and  happy  men. 
.  .  .  Through  the  mastery  which  the  yogi  attains  over  his  thoughts 
and  his  body,  he  grows  into  a  'character.'  By  the  subjection  of  his  im- 
pulses and  propensities  to  his  will,  and  the  fixing  of  the  latter  upon 
the  ideal  of  goodness,  he  becomes  a  'personality'  hard  to  influence  by 
others,  and  thus  almost  the  oDoosite  cf  what  we  usually  imagine  a 
'medium'  so-Called,  or  'osychic  subject'  to  be."  Karl  Kellner:  Yoga: 
Hiiie  Skizze,  Mijnchen,  1896,  p.  21. 


MYSTICISM  393 

self-consciousness.  In  the  fourth  stage  the  indifference,  mem- 
ory, and  self-consciousness  are  perfected.  [Just  what  "mem- 
ory" and  "self-consciousness"  mean  in  this  connection  is 
doubtful.  They  cannot  be  the  faculties  familiar  to  us  in  the 
lower  life.]  Higher  stages  still  of  contemplation  are  men- 
tioned— a  region  where  there  exists  nothing,  and  where  the 
mediator  says :  "There  exists  absolutely  nothing,"  and  stops. 
Then  he  reaches  another  region  where  he  says:  "There  are 
neither  ideas  nor  absence  of  ideas,"  and  stops  again.  Then 
another  region  where,  "having  reached  the  end  of  both  idea 
and  perception,  he  stops  finally."  This  would  seem  to  be, 
not  yet  Nirvana,  but  as  close  an  approach  to  it  as  this  life 
affords.^ 

In  the  Mohammedan  world  the  Sufi  sect  and  various  der- 
vish bodies  are  the  possessors  of  the  mystical  tradition.  The 
Sufis  have  existed  in  Persia  from  the  earliest  times,  and  as 
their  pantheism  is  so  at  variance  with  the  hot  and  rigid 
monotheism  of  the  Arab  mind,  it  has  been  suggested  that 
Sufism  must  have  been  inoculated  into  Islam  by  Hindu  in- 
fluences. We  Christians  know  little  of  Sufism,  for  its  secrets 
are  disclosed  only  to  those  initiated.  To  give  its  existence  a 
certain  livehness  in  your  minds,  I  will  quote  a  Moslem  docu- 
ment, and  pass  away  from  the  subject. 

Al-Ghazzali,  a  Persian  philosopher  and  theologian,  who 
flourished  in  the  eleventh  century,  and  ranks  as  one  of  the 
greatest  doctors  of  the  Moslem  church,  has  left  us  one  of  the 
few  autobiographies  to  be  found  outside  of  Christian  liter- 
ature. Strange  that  a  species  of  book  so  abundant  among 
ourselves  should  be  so  little  represented  elsewhere— the  ab- 
sence of  strictly  personal  confessions  is  the  chief  difficulty  to 
the  purely  literary  student  who  would  like  to  become  ac- 
quainted with  the  inwardner.s  of  religions  other  than  the 
Christian. 

^  1  follow  the  account  in  C.  F.  Koeppen:  Die  Religion  des  Buddha, 
Berlin,  1857,  i.  585  fl. 


394       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

M.  Schmolders  has  translated  a  part  of  Al-Ghazzali's  auto- 
biography into  French:  ^  — 

"The  Science  of  the  Sufis,"  says  the  Moslem  author,  "aims  at 
detaching  the  heart  from  all  that  is  not  God,  and  at  giving  to  it 
for  sole  occupation  the  meditation  of  the  divine  being.  Theory 
being  more  easy  for  me  than  practice,  I  read  [certain  books] 
until  I  understood  all  that  can  be  learned  by  study  and  hearsay. 
Then  I  recognized  that  what  pertains  most  exclusively  to  their 
method  is  just  what  no  study  can  grasp,  but  only  transport,  ec- 
stasy, and  the  transformation  of  the  soul.  How  great,  for  ex- 
ample, is  the  difference  between  knowing  the  definitions  of 
health,  of  satiety,  with  their  causes  and  conditions,  and  being 
really  healthy  or  filled.  How  different  to  know  in  what  drunk- 
enness consists — as  being  a  state  occasioned  by  a  vapor  that  rises 
from  the  stomach — and  being  drunk  effectively.  Without  doubt, 
the  drunken  man  knows  neither  the  definition  of  drunkenness 
nor  what  makes  it  interesting  for  science.  Being  drunk,  he 
knows  nothing;  whilst  the  physician,  although  not  drunk, 
knows  well  in  what  drunkenness  consists,  and  what  are  its  pre- 
disposing conditions.  Similarly  there  is  a  difference  between 
knowing  the  nature  of  abstinence,  and  being  abstinent  or  having 
one's  soul  detached  from  the  world. — Thus  I  had  learned  what 
words  could  teach  of  Sufism,  but  what  was  left  could  be  learned 
neither  by  study  nor  through  the  ears,  but  solely  by  giving  one's 
self  up  to  ecstasy  and  leading  a  pious  life. 

"Reflecting  on  my  situation,  I'  found  myself  tied  down  by  a 
multitude  of  bonds — temptations  on  every  side.  Considering  my 
teaching,  I  found  it  was  impure  before  God.  I  saw  myself  strug- 
gling with  all  my  might  to  achieve  glory  and  to  spread  my 
name.  [Here  follows  an  account  of  his  six  months'  hesitation  to 
break  away  from  the  conditions  of  his  life  at  Bagdad,  at  the  end 
of  which  he  fell  ill  with  a  paralysis  of  the  tongue.]  Then,  feel- 
ing my  own  weakness,  and  having  entirely  given  up  my  own 
will,  I  repaired  to  God  like  a  man  in  distress  who  has  no  more 

^  For  a  full  account  of  him,  see  D.  B.  Macdonald:  The  Life  of  Al- 
Ghazzali,  in  the  Journal  of  the  American  Oriental  Society,  1899,  vol. 
XX.,  p.  71. 


MYSTICISM  395 

resources.  He  answered,  as  he  answers  the  wretch  who  invokes 
him.  My  heart  no  longer  felt  any  difficulty  in  renouncing  glory, 
wealth,  and  my  children.  So  I  quitted  Bagdad,  and  reserving 
from  my  fortune  only  what  was  indispensable  for  my  subsist- 
ence, I  distributed  the  rest.  I  went  to  Syria,  where  I  remained 
about  two  years,  with  no  other  occupation  than  living  in  retreat 
and  solitude,  conquering  my  desires,  combating  my  passions, 
training  myself  to  purify  my  soul,  to  make  my  character  perfect, 
to  prepare  my  heart  for  meditating  on  God — all  according  to 
the  methods  of  the  Sufis,  as  I  had  read  of  them. 

"This  retreat  only  increased  my  desire  to  live  in  solitude,  and 
to  complete  the  purification  of  my  heart  and  fit  it  for  medita- 
tion. But  the  vicissitudes  of  the  times,  the  affairs  of  the  family, 
the  need  of  subsistence,  changed  in  some  respects  my  primitive 
resolve,  and  interfered  with  my  plans  for  a  purely  solitary  life, 
I  had  never  yet  found  myself  completely  in  ecstasy,  save  in  a  few 
single  hours;  nevertheless,  I  kept  the  hope  of  attaining  this  state. 
Every  time  that  the  accidents  led  me  astray,  I  sought  to  return; 
and  in  this  situation  I  spent  ten  years.  During  this  solitary  state 
things  were  revealed  to  me  which  it  is  impossible  either  to  de- 
scribe or  to  point  out.  I  recognized  for  certain  that  the  Sufis  are 
assuredly  walking  in  the  path  of  God.  Both  in  their  acts  and  in 
their  inaction,  whether  internal  or  external,  they  are  illumined 
by  the  light  which  proceeds  from  the  prophetic  source.  The  first 
condition  for  a  Sufi  is  to  purge  his  heart  entirely  of  all  that  is 
not  God.  The  next  key  of  the  contemplative  life  consists  in  the 
humble  prayers  which  escape  from  the  fervent  soul,  and  in  the 
meditations  or^  God  in  which  the  heart  is  swallowed  up  en- 
tirely. But  in  reality  this  is  only  the  beginning  of  the  Sufi  life, 
the  end  of  Sufism  being  total  absorption  in  God.  The  intuitions 
and  all  that  precede  are,  so  to  speak,  only  the  threshold  for  those 
who  enter.  From  the  beginning,  revelations  take  place  in  so 
flagrant  a  shape  that  the  Sufis  see  before  them,  whilst  wide 
awake,  the  angels  and  the  souls  of  the  prophets.  They  hear  their 
voices  and  obtain  their  favors.  Then  the  transport  rises  from  the 
perception  of  forms  and  figures  to  a  degree  which  escapes  all 
expression,  and  which  no  man  may  seek  to  give  an  account  ol 
without  his  words  involving  sin. 


^96       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

"Whosoever  has  had  no  experience  of  the  transport  knows  of 
the  true  nature  of  prophetism  nothing  but  the  name.  He  may 
meanwhile  be  sure  of  its  existence,  both  by  experience  and  by 
what  he  hears  the  Sufis  say.  As  there  are  men  endowed  only 
with  the  sensitive  faculty  who  reject  what  is  offered  them  in  the 
way  of  objects  of  the  pure  understanding,  so  there  are  intellec- 
tual men  who  reject  and  avoid  the  things  perceived  by  the  pro- 
phetic faculty.  A  blind  man  can  understand  nothing  of  colors 
save  what  he  has  learned  by  narration  and  hearsay.  Yet  God  has 
brought  prophetism  near  to  men  in  giving  them  all  a  state  anal- 
ogous to  it  in  its  principal  characters.  This  state  is  sleep.  If  you 
were  to  tell  a  man  who  was  himself  without  experience  of  such 
a  phenomenon  that  there  are  people  who  at  times  swoon  away 
so  as  to  resemble  dead  men,  and  who  [in  dreams]  yet  perceive 
things  that  are  hidden,  he  would  deny  it  [and  give  his  reasons]. 
Nevertheless,  his  arguments  would  be  refuted  by  actual  expe- 
rience. Wherefore,  just  as  the  understanding  is  a  stage  of  human 
life  in  which  an  eye  opens  to  discern  various  intellectual  objects 
uncomprehended  by  sensation;  just  so  in  the  prophetic  the  sight 
is  illumined  by  a  light  which  uncovers  hidden  things  and  ob- 
jects which  the  intellect  fails  to  reach.  The  chief  properties  of 
prophetism  are  perceptible  only  during  the  transport,  by  those 
who  embrace  the  Sufi  life.  The  prophet  is  endowed  with  quali- 
ties to  which  you  possess  nothing  analogous,  and  which  conse- 
quently you  cannot  possibly  understand.  How  should  you  know 
their  true  nature,  since  one  knows  only  what  one  can  compre- 
hend.'' But  the  transport  which  one  attains  by  the  method  of  the 
Sufis  is  like  an  immediate  perception,  as  if  one  touched  the  ob- 
jects with  one's  hand."  ^ 

This  incommunicableness  of  the  transport  is  the  keynote 
of  all  mysticism.  Mystical  truth  exists  for  the  individual 
who  has  the  transport,  but  for  no  one  else.  In  this,  as  I  have 
said,  it  resembles  the  knowledge  given  to  us  in  sensations 
more  than  that  given  by  conceptual  thought.  Thought,  with 
its  remoteness  and  abstractness,  has  often  enough  in  the  his- 

^  A.  ScHMOLDERs:  Essai  sur  ics  ecoles  philosophiques  chez  les 
Arabes,  Paris,  1842,  pp.  54-68,  abridged. 


MYSTICISM  397 

tory  of  philosophy  been  contrasted  unfavorably  with  sen- 
sation. It  is  a  commonplace  of  metaphysics  that  God's 
knowledge  cannot  be  discursive  but  must  be  intuitive,  that 
is,  must  be  constructed  more  after  the  pattern  of  what  in 
ourselves  is  called  immediate  feeling,  than  after  that  of  prop- 
osition and  judgment.  But  our  immediate  feelings  have  no 
content  but  what  the  five  senses  supply;  and  we  have  seen 
and  shall  see  again  that  mystics  may  emphatically  deny  that 
the  senses  play  any  part  in  the  very  highest  type  of  knowl- 
edge which  their  transports  yield. 

In  the  Christian  church  there  have  always  been  mystics. 
Although  many  of  them  have  been  viewed  with  suspicion, 
some  have  gained  favor  in  the  eyes  of  the  authorities.  The 
experiences  of  these  have  been  treated  as  precedents,  and  a 
codified  system  of  mystical  theology  has  been  based  upon 
them,  in  which  everything  legitimate  finds  its  place.-^  The 
basis  of  the  system  is  "orison"  or  meditation,  the  method- 
ical elevation  of  the  soul  towards  God.  Through  the  prac- 
tice of  orison  the  higher  levels  of  mystical  experience  may 
be  attained.  It  is  odd  that  Protestantism,  especially  evangel- 
ical Protestantism,  should  seemingly  have  abandoned  every- 
thing methodical  in  this  line.  Apart  from  what  prayer  may 
lead  to,  Protestant  mystical  experience  appears  to  have  been 
almost  exclusively  sporadic.  It  has  been  left  to  our  mind- 
curers  to  reintroduce  methodical  meditation  into  our  reli- 
gious life. 

The  first  thing  to  be  aimed  at  in  orison  is  the  mind's  de- 
tachment from  outer  sensations,  for  these  interfere  with  its 
concentration  upon  ideal  things.  Such  manuals  as  Saint 
Ignatius's   Spiritual   Exercises   recommend   the   disciple   to 

1  GoRREs's  Christliche  Mystik  gives  a  full  account  of  the  facts.  So 
does  Ribet's  Mystique  Divine,  2  vols.,  Paris,  1890.  A  still  more 
methodical  modern  work  is  the  Mystica  Theologia  of  Vallgornera, 
2  vols.,  Turin,  1890. 


398      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

expel  sensation  by  a  graduated  series  of  efforts  to  imagine 
holy  scenes.  The  acme  of  this  kind  of  disciplme  would  be  a 
serai-hallucinatory  mono-ideism — an  imaginary  figure  of 
Christ,  for  example,  coming  fully  to  occupy  the  mind.  Sen- 
sorial images  of  this  sort,  whether  literal  or  symbolic,  play 
an  enormous  part  in  mysticism.-^  But  in  certain  cases  imag- 
ery may  fall  away  entirely,  and  in  the  very  highest  raptures 
it  tends  to  do  so.  The  state  of  consciousness  becomes  then 
insusceptible  of  any  verbal  description.  Mystical  teachers 
are  unanimous  as  to  this.  Saint  John  of  the  Cross,  for  in- 
stiance,  one  of  the  best  of  them,  thus  describes  the  condition 
called  the  "union  of  love,"  which,  he  says,  is  reached  by 
"dark  contemplation."  In  this  the  Deity  compenetrates  the 
soul,  but  in  such  a  hidden  way  that  the  soul — 

"finds  no  terms,  no  means,  no  comparison  whereby  to  render 
the  sublimity  of  the  wisdom  and  the  delicacy  of  the  spiritual 
feeling  with  which  she  is  filled.  .  .  .  We  receive  this  mystical 
knowledge  of  God  clothed  in  none  of  the  kinds  of  images,  in 
none  of  the  sensible  representations,  which  our  mind  makes  use 
of  in  other  circumstances.  Accordingly  in  this  knowledge,  since 
the  senses  and  the  imagination  are  not  employed,  we  get  neither 
form  nor  impression,  nor  can  we  give  any  account  or  furnish 
any  likeness,  although  the  mysterious  and  sweet-tasting  wisdom 
comes  home  so  clearly  to  the  inmost  parts  of  our  soul.  Fancy  a 
man  seeing  a  certain  kind  of  thing  for  the  first  time  in  his  life. 
He  can  understand  it,  use  and  enjoy  it,  but  he  cannot  apply  a 
name  to  it,  nor  communicate  any  idea  of  it,  even  though  all  the 
while  it  be  a  mere  thing  of  sense.  How  much  greater  will  be  his 
powerlessness  when  it  goes  beyond  the  senses!  This  is  the  pecu- 
liarity of  the  divine  language.  The  more  infused,  intimate,  spir- 
itual, and  supersensible  it  is,  the  more  does  it  exceed  the  senses, 

^  M.  Recejac,  in  a  recent  volume,  makes  them  essential.  Mysticism 
he  defines  as  "the  tendency  to  draw  near  to  the  Absolute  morally, 
and  by  the  aid  of  Symbols."  See  his  Fondements  de  la  Connaissance 
mystique,  Paris,  1897,  P-  66.  But  there  are  unquestionably  mystical 
rondidons  in  which  sensible  symbols  play  no  part. 


MYSTICISM  399 

both  inner  and  outer,  and  impose  silence  upon  them.  .  .  .  The 
soul  then  feels  as  if  placed  in  a  vast  and  profound  solitude,  to 
which  no  created  thing  has  access,  in  an  immense  and  bound- 
less desert,  desert  the  more  delicious  the  more  solitary  it  is. 
There,  in  this  abyss  of  wisdom,  the  soul  grows  by  what  it  drinks 
in  from  the  well-springs  of  the  comprehension  of  love,  .  .  .  and 
recognizes,  however  sublime  and  learned  may  be  the  terms  we 
employ,  how  utterly  vile,  insignificant,  and  improper  they  are, 
when  we  seek  to  discourse  of  divine  things  by  their  means."  ^ 

I  cannot  pretend  to  detail  to  you  the  sundry  stages  of  the. 
Christian  mystical  life."  Our  time  would  not  suffice,  for  one 
thing;  and  moreover,  I  confess  that  the  subdivisions  and 
names  which  we  find  in  the  Catholic  books  seem  to  me  to 
represent  nothing  objectively  distinct.  So  many  men,  so 
many  minds:  I  imagine  that  these  experiences  can  be  as  in- 
finitely varied  as  are  the  idiosyncrasies  of  individuals. 

The  cognitive  aspects  of  them,  their  value  in  the  way  of 
revelation,  is  what  we  are  directly  concerned  with,  and  it 
is  easy  to  show  by  citation  how  strong  an  impression  they 
leave  of  being  revelations  of  new  depths  of  truth.  Saint  Ter- 
esa is  the  expert  of  experts  in  describing  such  conditions,  so 
I  will  turn  immediately  to  what  she  says  of  one  of  the  high- 
est of  them,  the  "orison  of  union." 

^  Saint  John  of  the  Cross:  The  Dark  Night  of  the  Soul,  book  ii. 
ch.  xvii.,  in  Vie  et  Qiuvres,  3me  edition,  Paris,  1893,  iii.  428-432. 
Chapter  xi.  of  book  ii.  of  Saint  John's  Ascent  of  Carmel  is  devoted 
to  showing  the  harmfulness  for  the  mystical  life  of  the  use  of  sensible 
imagery. 

^  In  particular  I  omit  mention  of  visual  and  auditory  hallucina- 
tions, verbal  and  graphic  automatisms,  and  such  marvels  as  "levita- 
tion,"  stigmatization,  and  the  healing  of  disease.  These  phenomena, 
which  mystics  have  often  presented  (or  are  believe^  to  have  pre- 
sented), have  no  essential  mystical  significance,  for  they  occur  with 
no  consciousness  of  illumination  whatever,  when  they  occur,  as  they 
often  do,  in  persons  of  non-mystical  mind.  Consciousness  of  illumina- 
tion is  for  us  the  essential  mark  of  "mystical"  states. 


400       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

"In  the  orison  of  union,"  says  Saint  Teresa,  "the  soul  is  fully 
juvakc  as  regards  God,  but  wholly  asleep  as  regards  things  of 
this  world  and  in  respect  of  herself.  During  the  short  time  the 
union  lasts,  she  is  as  it  were  deprived  of  every  feeling,  and  even 
if  she  would,  she  could  not  think  of  any  single  thing.  Thus  she 
needs  to  employ  no  artifice  in  order  to  arrest  the  use  of  her 
understanding:  it  remains  so  stricken  with  inactivity  that  she 
neither  knows  what  she  loves,  nor  in  what  manner  she  loves, 
nor  what  she  wills.  In  short,  she  is  utterly  dead  to  the  things  of 
the  world  and  lives  solely  in  God.  ...  I  do  not  even  know 
whether  in  this  state  she  has  enough  life  left  to  breathe.  It  seems 
to  me  she  has  not;  or  at  least  that  if  she  does  breathe,  she  is  un- 
aware of  it.  Her  intellect  would  fain  understand  something  of 
what  is  going  on  within  her,  but  it  has  so  little  force  now  that 
it  can  a:t  in  no  v/ay  whatsoever.  So  a  person  who  falls  into  a 
deep  faint  appears  as  if  dead.  .  .  . 

"Thus  dees  God,  when  he  raises  a  soul  to  union  with  him- 
self, suspend  the  natural  action  of  all  her  faculties.  She  neither 
sees,  hears,  nor  understands,  so  long  as  she  is  united  with  God. 
But  this  time  is  always  short,  and  it  seems  even  shorter  than  it 
is.  God  establishes  himself  in  the  interior  of  this  soul  in  such  a 
way,  that  when  she  returns  to  herself,  it  is  wholly  impossible 
for  her  to  doubt  that  she  has  been  in  God,  and  God  in  her.  This 
truth  remains  so  strongly  impressed  on  her  that,  even  though 
many  years  should  pass  without  the  condition  returning,  she 
can  neither  forget  the  favor  she  received,  nor  doubt  of  its  real- 
ity. If  you,  nevertheless,  ask  how  it  is  possible  that  the  soul  can 
see  and  understand  that  she  has  been  in  God,  since  during  the 
union  she  has  neither  sight  nor  understanding,  I  reply  that  she 
does  not  see  it  then,  but  that  she  sees  it  clearly  later,  after  she 
has  returned  to  herself,  not  by  any  vision,  but  by  a  certitude 
which  abides  with  her  and  which  God  alone  can  give  her.  I 
knew  a  person  who  was  ignorant  of  the  truth  that  God's  mode 
of  being  in  everything  must  be  either  by  presence,  by  power,  or 
by  essence,  but  who,  after  having  received  the  grace  of  which  I 
am  speaking,  believed  this  truth  in  the  most  unshakable  man- 
ner. So  much  so  that,  having  consulted  a  half-learned  man  who 
was  a«  ignorant  on  this  point  as  she  had  been  before  she  was 


MYSTICISM  401 

enlightened,  when  he  replied  that  God  is  in  us  only  by  'grace/ 
she  disbelieved  his  reply,  so  sure  she  was  of  the  true  answer, 
and  when  she  came  to  ask  wiser  doctors,  they  confirmed  her  in 
her  belief,  which  much  consoled  her.  .  .  . 

"But  how,  you  will  repeat,  can  one  have  such  certainty  in  re- 
spect to  what  one  does  not  see?  This  question,  I  am  powerless 
to  answer.  These  are  secrets  of  God's  omnipotence  which  it  does 
not  appertain  to  me  to  penetrate.  All  that  I  know  is  that  I  tell 
the  truth;  and  I  shall  never  believe  that  any  soul  who  does  not 
possess  this  certainty  has  ever  been  really  united  to  God."  ^ 

The  kinds  of  truth  communicable  in  mystical  ways, 
whether  these  be  sensible  or  supersensible,  are  various.  Some 
of  them  relate  to  this  world — visions  of  the  future,  the  read- 
ing of  hearts,  the  sudden  understanding  of  texts,  the 
knowledge  of  distant  events,  for  example;  but  the  most  im- 
portant revelations  are  theological  or  metaphysical. 

"Saint  Ignatius  confessed  one  day  to  Father  Laynez  that  a 
single  hour  of  meditation  at  Manresa  had  taught  him  more 
truths  about  heavenly  things  than  all  the  teachings  of  all  the  doc- 
tors put  together  could  have  taught  him.  .  .  .  One  day  in  orison, 
on  the  steps  of  the  choir  of  the  Dominican  church,  he  saw  in  -^ 
distinct  manner  the  plan  of  divine  wisdom  in  the  creation  of 
the  world.  On  another  occasion,  during  a  procession,  his  spirit 
was  ravished  in  God,  and  it  was  given  him  to  contemplate,  in  a 
form  and  images  fitted  to  the  weak  understanding  of  a  dweller 
on  the  earth,  the  deep  mystery  of  the  holy  Trinity.  This  last 
vision  flooded  his  heart  with  such  sweetness,  that  the  mere 
memory  of  it  in  after  times  made  him  shed  abundant  tears."  " 

^  The  Interior  Castle,  Fifth  Abode,  ch.  i.,  in  CEuvres,  translated  by 
Bouix,  iii.  421-424. 

2  Bartoli-Michel:  Vie  de  Saint  Ignace  de  Loyola,  i.  34-36.  Others 
have  had  illuminations  about  the  created  world,  Jacob  Boehme,  for 
instance.  At  die  age  of  twenty-five  he  was  "surrounded  by  the  divine 
light,  and  replenished  with  the  heavenly  knowledge;  insomuch  a< 
going  abroad  into  the  fields  to  a  green,  at  Gorlitz,  he  there  sat  down, 
and  viewing  the  herbs  and  grass  of  the  field,  in  his  inward  light  he 
saw  into  their  essences,  use,  and  properties,  which  was  discovered  lo 


402       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Similarly  with  Saint  Teresa.  "One  day,  being  in  orison,"  she 
writes,  "it  was  granted  me  to  perceive  in  one  instant  how  all 
things  are  seen  and  contained  in  God.  I  did  not  perceive  them 
in  their  proper  form,  and  nevertheless  the  view  I  had  of  them 
was  of  a  sovereign  clearness,  and  has  remained  vividly  impressed 
upon  my  soul.  It  is  one  of  the  most  signal  of  all  the  graces  which 
the  Lord  has  granted  me.  .  .  .  The  view  was  so  subtile  and  del- 
icate that  the  understanding  cannot  grasp  it."  ^ 

She  goes  on  to  tell  how  it  was  as  if  the  Deity  were  an 
enormous  and  sovereignly  limpid  diamond,  in  which  all  our 
actions  were  contained  in  such  a  way  that  their  full  sinful- 

him  by  their  lineaments,  figures,  and  signatures."  Of  a  later  period  of 
experience  he  writes:  "In  one  quarter  of  an  hour  I  saw  and  knew 
more  than  if  I  had  been  many  years  together  at  an  university.  For  1 
saw  and  knew  the  being  of  all  things,  the  Byss  and  the  Abyss,  and 
the  eternal  generation  of  the  holy  Trinity,  the  descent  and  original 
of  the  world  and  of  all  creatures  through  the  divine  wisdom.  I  knew 
and  saw  in  myself  all  the  three  worlds,  the  external  and  visible  world 
being  of  a  procreation  or  extern  birth  from  both  the  internal  and 
spiritual  worlds;  and  I  saw  and  knew  the  whole  working  essence,  in 
the  evil  and  in  the  good,  and  the  mutual  original  and  existence;  and 
likewise  how  the  fruitful  bearing  womb  of  eternity  brought  forth. 
So  that  I  did  not  only  greatly  wonder  at  it,  but  did  also  exceedingly 
rejoice,  albeit  I  could' very  hardly  apprehend  the  same  in  my  external 
man  and  set  it  down  with  the  pen.  For  I  had  a  thorough  view  of  the 
universe  as  in  a  chaos,  wherein  all  things  are  couched  and  wrapt  up, 
but  it  was  impossible  for  me  to  explicate  the  same."  Jacob  Behmen's 
Theosophic  Philosophy,  etc.,  by  Edward  Taylor,  London,  1691,  pp. 
425,  427,  abridged.  So  George  Fox:  "I  was  come  up  to  the  state  of 
Adam  in  which  he  was  before  he  fell.  The  creation  was  opened  to 
me;  and  it  was  showed  me,  how  all  things  had  their  names  given  to 
them,  according  to  their  nature  and  \irtue.  I  was  at  a  stand  in  my 
mind,  whether  I  should  practice  physic  for  the  good  of  mankind, 
seeing  the  nature  and  virtues  of  the  creatures  were  so  opened  to  me 
by  the  Lord."  Journal,  Philadelphia,  no  date,  p.  69.  Contemporary 
"Clairvoyance"  abounds  in  similar  revelations.  Andrew  Jackson 
Davis's  cosmogonies,  for  example,  or  certain  experiences  related  in 
the  delectable  "Reminiscences  and  Memories  of  Henry  Thomas  But- 
'srworth,"  Lebanon,  Ohio,  1886. 
1  Vie,  pp.  581,  582. 


MYSTICISM  403 

ness  appeared  evident  as  never  before.  On  another  day,  she 
relates,  while  she  was  reciting  the  Athanasian  Creed — 

"Our  Lord  made  me  comprehend  in  what  way  it  is  that  one 
God  can  be  in  three  persons.  He  made  me  see  it  so  clearly  that 
I  remained  as  extremely  surprised  as  I  was  comforted,  .  .  .  and 
now,  when  I  think  of  the  holy  Trinity,  or  hear  It  spoken  of,  I 
understand  how  the  three  adorable  Persons  form  only  one  God 
and  I  experience  an  unspeakable  happiness." 

On  still  another  occasion,  it  was  given  to  Saint  Teresa  to 
see  and  understand  in  what  wise  the  Mother  of  God  had 
been  assumed  into  her  place  in  Heaven.^ 

The  deliciousness  of  some  of  these  states  seems  to  be  be- 
yond anything  known  in  ordinary  consciousness.  It  evi- 
dently involves  organic  sensibilities,  for  it  is  spoken  of  as 
something  too  extreme  to  be  borne,  and  as  verging  on  bodily 
pain.^  But  it  is  too  subtle  and  piercing  a  delight  for  ordi- 
nary words  to  denote.  God's  touches,  the  wounds  of  his 
spear,  references  to  ebriety  and  to  nuptial  union  have  to 
figure  in  the  phraseology  by  which  it  is  shadowed  forth. 
Intellect  and  senses  both  swoon  away  in  these  highest  states 
of  ecstasy.  "If  our  understanding  comprehends,"  says  Saint 
Teresa,  "it  is  in  a  mode  which  remains  unknown  to  it,  and 
it  can  understand  nothing  of  what  it  comprehends.  For  m) 
own  part,  I  do  not  believe  that  it  does  comprehend,  because, 
as  I  said,  it  does  not  understand  itself  to  do  so.  I  confess  that 
it  is  all  a  mystery  in  which.  I  am  lost."  ^  In  the  condition 
called  rapttis  or  ravishment  by  theologians,  breathing  and 

1  Loc.  cit.,  p.  574. 

2  Saint  Teresa  discriminates  between  pain  in  which  the  body  has 
a  part  and  pure  spiritual  pain  (Interior  Casde,  6th  Abode,  ch.  xi.).  A& 
for  the  bodily  part  in  these  celesdal  joys,  she  speaks  of  it  as  "pene- 
tradng  to  the  marrow  of  the  bones,  whilst  earthly  pleasures  affect 
only  the  surface  of  the  senses.  I  think,"  she  adds,  "that  this  is  a  just 
descripdon,  and  I  cannot  make  it  better."  Ibid.,  5th  Abode,  ch.  i. 

^  Vie,  p.  198. 


404      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

circulation  are  so  depressed  that  it  is  a  question  among  the 
doctors  whether  the  soul  be  or  be  not  temporarily  dis- 
severed from  the  body.  One  must  read  Saint  Teresa's  de- 
scriptions and  the  very  exact  distinctions  which  she  makes, 
to  persuade  one's  self  that  one  is  dealing,  not  with  imagi- 
nary experiences,  but  with  phenomena  which,  however  rare, 
follow  perfectly  definite  psychological  types. 

To  the  medical  mind  these  ecstasies  signify  nothing  but 
suggested  and  imitated  hypnoid  states,  on  an  intellectual 
basis  of  superstition,  and  a  corporeal  one  of  degeneration 
and  hysteria.  Undoubtedly  these  pathological  conditions 
have  existed  in  many  and  possibly  in  all  the  cases,  but  that 
fact  tells  us  nothing  about  the  value  for  knowledge  of  the 
consciousness  which  they  induce.  To  pass  a  spiritual  judg- 
ment upon  these  states,  we  must  not  content  ourselves  with 
superficial  medical  talk,  but  inquire  into  their  fruits  for  life. 

Their  fruits  appear  to  have  been  various.  Stupefaction,  for 
one  thing,  seems  not  to  have  been  altogether  absent  as  a  re- 
sult. You  may  remember  the  helplessness  in  the  kitchen  and 
schoolroom  of  poor  Margaret  Mary  Alacoque.  Many  other 
ecstatics  would  have  perished  but  for  the  care  taken  of 
them  by  admiring  followers.  The  "other-worldliness"  en- 
couraged by  the  mystical  consciousness  makes  this  over-ab- 
straction from  practical  life  peculiarly  liable  to  befall  mys- 
tics in  whom  the  character  is  naturally  passive  and  the  in- 
tellect feeble;  but  in  natively  strong  minds  and  characters 
we  find  quite  opposite  results.  The  great  Spanish  mystics, 
who  carried  the  habit  of  ecstasy  as  far  as  it  has  often  been 
carried,  appear  for  the  most  part  to  have  shown  indomitable 
spirit  and  energy,  and  all  the  more  so  for  the  trances  in 
which  they  indulged. 

Saint  Ignatius  was  a  mystic,  but  his  mysticism  made  him 
assuredly  one  of  the  most  powerfully  practical  human  en- 
gines that  ever  lived.  Saint  John  of  the  Cross,  writing  of  the 


MYSTICISM  405 

intuitions  and  "touches"  by  which  God  reaches  the  sub- 
stance of  the  soul,  tells  us  that — 

"They  enrich  it  marvelously.  A  single  one  of  them  may  be 
sufficient  to  abolish  at  a  stroke  certain  imperfections  of  which 
the  soul  during  its  whole  life  had  vainly  tried  to  rid  itself,  and 
to  leave  it  adorned  with  virtues  and  loaded  with  supernatura). 
gifts.  A  single  one  of  these  intoxicating  consolations  may  reward 
it  for  all  the  labors  undergone  in  its  life — even  were  they  num 
berless.  Invested  with  an  invincible  courage,  filled  with  an  im- 
passioned desire  to  suffer  for  its  God,  the  soul  then  is  seized 
with  a  strange  torment — that  of  not  being  allowed  to  suffer 
enough."  ^ 

Saint  Teresa  is  as  emphatic,  and  much  more  detailed. 
You  may  perhaps  remember  a  passage  I  quoted  from  her 
in  my  first  lecture.^  There  are  many  similar  pages  in  her 
autobiography.  Where  in  literature  is  a  more  evidently  vera- 
cious account  of  the  formation  of  a  new  centre  of  spiritual 
energy,  than  is  given  in  her  description  of  the  effects  of  cer- 
tain ecstasies  which  in  departing  leave  the  soul  upon  a  high- 
er level  of  emotional  excitement.'' 

"Often,  infirm  and  wrought  upon  with  dreadful  pains  before 
the  ecstasy,  the  soul  emerges  from  it  full  of  health  and  admir- 
ably disposed  for  action  ...  as  if  God  had  willed  that  the  body 
itself,  already  obedient  to  the  soul's  desires,  should  share  in  the 
soul's  happiness.  .  .  .  The  soul  after  such  a  favor  is  animated 
with  a  degree  of  courage  so  great  that  if  at  that  moment  its  body 
should  be  torn  to  pieces  for  the  cause  of  God,  it  would  feel 
nothing  but  the  liveliest  comfort.  Then  it  is  that  promises  and 
heroic  resolutions  spring  up  in  profusion  in  us,  soaring  desires, 
horror  of  the  world,  and  the  clear  perception  of  our  proper 
nothingness.  .  .  .  What  empire  is  comparable  to  that  of  a  soul 
who,  from  this  sublime  summit  to  which  God  has  raised  her, 

^  CEuvres,  ii.  320. 
^  Above,  p.  22. 


406      THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

sees  all  the  things  of  earth  beneath  her  feet,  and  is  captivated  by 
no  one  of  them?  How  ashamed  she  is  of  her  former  attach- 
ments! How  amazed  at  her  blindness!  What  lively  pity  she 
feels  for  those  whom  she  recognizes  still  shrouded  in  the  dark- 
ness! .  .  .  She  groans  at  having  ever  been  sensitive  to  points 
of  honor,  at  the  illusion  that  made  her  ever  see  as  honor  what 
the  world  calls  by  that  name.  Now  she  sees  in  this  name  noth- 
ing more  than  an  immense  lie  of  which  the  world  remains  a 
victim.  She  discovers,  in  the  new  light  from  above,  that  in  gen- 
uine honor  there  is  nothing  spurious,  that  to  be  faithful  to  this 
honor  is  to  give  our  respect  to  what  deserves  to  be  respected 
really,  and  to  consider  as  nothing,  or  as  less  than  nothing,  what- 
soever perishes  and  is  not  agreeable  to  God.  .  .  .  She  laughs 
when  she  sees  grave  persons,  persons  of  orison,  caring  for  points 
of  honor  for  which  she  now  feels  profoundest  contempt.  It  is 
suitable  to  the  dignity  of  their  rank  to  act  thus,  they  pretend, 
and  it  makes  them  more  useful  to  others.  But  she  knows  that 
in  despising  the  dignity  of  their  rank  for  the  pure  love  of  God 
they  would  do  more  good  in  a  single  day  than  they  would  effect 
in  ten  years  by  preserving  it.  .  .  .  She  laughs  at  herself  that 
there  should  ever  have  been  a  time  in  her  life  when  she  made 
any  case  of  money,  when  she  ever  desired  it.  .  .  .  Oh!  if  human 
beings  might  only  agree  together  to  regard  it  as  so  much  useless 
mud,  what  harmony  would  then  reign  in  the  world!  With  what 
friendship  we  would  all  treat  each  other  if  our  interest  in  honor 
and  in  money  could  but  disappear  from  earth!  For  my  own 
part,  I  feel  as  if  it  would  be  a  remedy  for  all  our  ills."  ^ 

Mystical  conditions  may,  therefore,  render  the  soul  more 
energetic  in  the  lines  which  their  inspiration  favors.  But 
this  could  be  reckoned  an  advantage  only  in  case  the  in- 
spiration were  a  true  one.  If  the  inspiration  were  erroneous, 
the  energy  w^ould  be  all  the  more  mistaken  and  misbegotten. 
So  we  stand  once  more  before  that  problem  of  truth  which 
confronted  us  at  the  end  of  the  lectures  on  saintliness.  You 
will  remember  that  we  turned  to  mysticism  precisely  to  get 

1  Vic,  pp.  229,  200,  231-233,  243. 


MYSTICISM  407 

some  light  on  truth.  Do  mystical  states  cstabhsh  the  truth  of 
those  theological  affections  in  which  the  saintly  life  has  its 
root  ? 

In  spite  of  their  repudiation  of  articulate  self-description, 
mystical  states  in  general  assert  a  pretty  distinct  theoretic 
drift.  It  is  possible  to  give  the  outcome  of  the  majority  of 
them  in  terms  that  point  in  definite  philosophical  directions 
One  of  these  directions  is  optimism,  and  the  other  is  mon^ 
ism.  We  pass  into  mystical  states  from  out  of  ordinary  con^ 
sciousness  as  from  a  less  into  a  more,  as  from-  a  smallnesS 
into  a  vastness,  and  at  the  same  time  as  from  an  unrest  to  a 
rest.  We  feel  them  as  reconciling,  unifying  states.  They  ap- 
peal to  the  yes-function  more  than  to  the  no-function  in  us. 
In  them  the  unlimited  absorbs  the  limits  and  peacefully 
closes  the  account.  Their  very  denial  of  every  adjective  you 
may  propose  as  applicable  to  the  ultimate  truth — He,  the 
Self,  the  Atman,  is  to  be  described  by  "No!  no!"  only,  say 
the  Upanishads  ^ — though  it  seems  on  the  surface  to  be  a 
no-function,  is  a  denial  made  on  behalf  of  a  deeper  yes. 
Whoso  calls  the  Absolute  anything  in  particular,  or  says 
that  it  is  this,  seems  implicitly  to  shut  it  oflf  from  being  that 
— it  is  as  if  he  lessened  it.  So  we  deny  the  "this,"  negating 
the  negation  which  it  seems  to  us  to  imply,  in  the  interests 
of  the  higher  affirmative  attitude  by  which  we  are  possessed. 
The  fountain-head  of  Christian  mysticism  is  Dionysius  the 
Areopagite.  He  describes  the  absolute  truth  by  negatives 
exclusively. 

"The  cause  of  all  things  is  neither  soul  nor  intellect;  nor  has 
it  imagination,  opinion,  or  reason,  or  intelligence;  nor  is  it  rea- 
son or  intelligence;  nor  is  it  spoken  or  thought.  It  is  neither 
number,  nor  order,  nor  magnitude,  nor  littleness,  nor  equality, 
nor  inequality,  nor  similarity,  nor  dissimilarity.  It  ncithei 
stands,  nor  moves,  nor  rests.  ...  It  is  neither  essence,   not 

^  Muller's  translation,  part  ii.  p.  180. 


408       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

eternity,  nor  time.  Even  intellectual  contact  does  not  belong  to 
it.  It  is  neither  science  nor  truth.  It  is  not  even  royalty  or  wis- 
dom; not  one;  not  unity;  not  divinity  or  goodness;  nor  even 
spirit  as  we  know  it,"  etc.,  ad  libitum} 

But  these  qualifications  are  denied  by  Dionysius,  not  be- 
cause the  truth  falls  short  of  them,  but  because  it  so  infinitely 
excels  them.  It  is  above  them.  It  is  i-M/7^r-lucent,  super- 
splendent,  super-csstniizX,  super-suhXimt,  super  everything 
that  can  be  named.  Like  Hegel  in  his  logic,  mystics  journey 
towards  the  positive  pole  of  truth  only  by  the  "Methode  der 
Absoluten  Negativitat."  " 

Thus  come  the  paradoxical  expressions  that  so  abound  in 
mystical  writings.  As  when  Eckhart  tells  of  the  still  desert 
of  the  Godhead,  "where  never  was  seen  difference,  neither 
Father,  Son,  nor  Holy  Ghost,  where  there  is  no  one  at  home, 
yet  where  the  spark  of  the  soul  is  more  at  peace  than  in  it- 
self." ^  As  when  Boehme  writes  of  the  Primal  Lx)ve,  that  "it 
may  fitly  be  compared  to  Nothing,  for  it  is  deeper  than  any 
Thing,  and  is  as  nothing  with  respect  to  all  things,  foras- 
much as  it  is  not  comprehensible  by  any  of  them.  And  be- 
cause it  is  nothing  respectively,  it  is  therefore  free  from  all 
things,  and  is  that  only  good,  which  a  man  cannot  express 
or  utter  what  it  is,  there  being  nothing  to  which  it  may  be 
compared,  to  express  it  by."  *  Or  as  when  Angelus  Silesius 


sings  :- 


"Gott  ist  ein  lauter  Nichts,  ihn  riihrt  kein  Nun  noch  Hier; 
}e  mehr  du  nach  ihm  greiffst,  je  mehr  entwind  er  dir."  ^ 

^  T.  Davidson's  translation,  in  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy, 
1893,  vol.  xxii.,  p.  399. 

-  "Deus  propter  excellentiam  non  immerito  Nihil  vocatur."  Scotus 
Erigena,  quoted  by  Andrew  Seth:  Two  Lectures  on  Theism,  New 
York,  1897,  p.  55-        _ 

^'  J.  Royce:  Studies  in  Good  and  Evil,  p.  282. 

"^  Jacob  Behmen's  Dialogues  on  the  Supersensual  Life,  translated 
by  Bernard  Holland,  London,  1901,  p.  48. 

^  Cherubinischer  Wandersmann,  Strophe  25. 


MYSTICISM  409 

To  this  dialectical  use,  by  the  intellect,  of  negation  as  a 
mode  of  passage  towards  a  higher  kind  of  affirmation,  there 
is  correlated  the  subtlest  of  moral  counterparts  in  the  sphere 
of  the  personal  will.  Since  denial  of  the  finite  self  and  its 
wants,  since  asceticism  of  some  sort,  is  found  in  religious 
experience  to  be  the  only  doorway  to  the  larger  and  more 
blessed  life,  this  moral  mystery  intertwines  and  combines 
with  the  intellectual  mystery  in  all  mystical  writings. 

"Love,"  continues  Behmen,  is  Nothing,  for  "when  thou  art 
gone  forth  wholly  from  the  Creature  and  from  that  which  is 
visible,  and  art  become  Nothing  to  all  that  is  Nature  and  Crea- 
ture, then  thou  art  in  that  eternal  One,  which  is  God  himself, 
and  then  thou  shalt  feel  within  thee  the  highest  virtue  of  Love. 
.  .  .  The  treasure  of  treasures  for  the  soul  is  where  she  goeth 
out  of  the  Somewhat  into  that  Nothing  out  of  which  all  things 
may  be  made.  The  soul  here  saith,  /  have  nothing,  for  I  am  ut- 
terly stripped  and  naked;  /  can  do  nothing,  for  I  have  no  man- 
ner of  power,  but  am  as  water  poured  out;  /  am  nothing,  for  all 
that  I  am  is  no  more  than  an  image  of  Being,  and  only  God  is 
to  me  I  AM;  and  so,  sitting  down  in  my  own  Nothingness,  I 
give  glory  to  the  eternal  Being,  and  will  nothing  of  myself,  that 
so  God  may  will  all  in  me,  being  unto  me  my  God  and  all 
things."  ^ 

In  Paul's  language,  I  live,  yet  not  I,  but  Christ  liveth  in 
me.  Only  when  I  become  as  nothing  can  God  enter  in  and 
no  difference  between  his  life  and  mine  remain  outstanding.^ 

^  Op.  cit.,  pp.  42,  74,  abridged. 

2  From  a  French  book  I  take  this  mystical  expression  of  happiness 
in  God's  indwelling  presence: — 

"Jesus  has  come  to  take  up  his  abode  in  my  heart.  It  is  not  so  much 
a  habitation,  an  association,  as  a  sort  of  fusion.  Oh,  new  and  blessed 
life!  life  which  becomes  each  day  more  luminous.  .  .  .  The  wall  be- 
fore me,  dark  a  few  moments  since,  is  splendid  at  this  hour  because 
the  sun  shines  on  it.  Wherever  its  rays  fall  they  light  up  a  conflagra- 
tion of  glory;  the  smallest  speck  of  glass  sparkles,  each  grain  of  sand 
emits  fire;  even  so  there  is  a  royal  song  of  triumph  in  my  heart  he 


410       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

This  overco mills:'-  of  all  the  usual  barriers  between  the  in- 
dividual  and  the  Absolute  is  the  great  mystic  achievement. 
In  mystic  states  we  both  become  one  with  the  Absolute  and 
we  become  aware  of  our  oneness.  This  is  the  everlasting  and 
triumphant  mystical  tradition,  hardly  altered  by  differences 
of  clime  or  creed.  In  Hinduism,  in  Neoplatonism,  in  Sufism, 
in  Christian  mysticism,  in  Whitmanism,  we  find  the  same 
recurring  note,  so  that  there  is  about  mystical  utterances  an 
eternal  unanimity  which  ought  to  make  a  critic  stop  and 
think,  and  which  brings  it  about  that  the  mystical  classics 
have,  as  has  been  said,  neither  birthday  nor  native  land. 
Perpetually  telling  of  the  unity  of  man  with  God,  their 
speech  antedates  languages,  and  they  do  not  grow  old.^ 

"That  art  Thou!"  say  the  Upanishads,  and  the  Vedantists 
add:  "Not  a  part,  not  a  mode  of  That,  but  identically  That, 
that  absolute  Spirit  of  the  World."  "As  pure  water  poured 

cause  the  Lord  is  there.  My  days  succeed  each  other;  yesterday  a  blue 
sky;  to-day  a  clouded  sun;  a  night  filled  with  strange  dreams;  but  as 
soon  as  the  eyes  open,  and  I  regain  consciousness  and  seem  to  begin 
life  again,  it  is  always  the  same  figure  before  me,  always  the  same 
presence  filling  my  heart.  .  .  .  Formerly  the  day  was  dulled  by  the 
absence  of  the  Lord.  I  used  to  wake  invaded  by  all  sorts  of  sad  im- 
pressions, and  I  did  not  find  him  on  my  path.  To-day  he  is  with  me; 
and  the  light  cloudiness  which  covers  things  is  not  an  obstacle  to  my 
communion  with  him.  I  feel  the  pressure  of  his  hand,  I  feel  some- 
thing else  which  fills  me  with  a  serene  joy;  shall  I  dare  to  speak  it 
out?  Yes,  for  it  is  the  true  expression  of  what  I  experience.  The  Holy 
Spirit  is  not  merely  making  me  a  visit;  it  is  no  mere  dazzling  ap- 
paridon  which  may  from  one  moment  to  another  spread  its  wings 
and  leave  me  in  my  night,  it  is  a  permanent  habitation.  He  can  de- 
part only  if  he  takes  me  with  him.  More  than  that;  he  is  not  other 
than  myself:  he  is  one  with  me.  It  is  not  a  juxtaposition,  it  is  a  pene- 
tration, a  profound  modification  of  my  nature,  a  new  manner  of  my 
being."  Quoted  from  the  MS.  "of  an  old  man"  by  Wilfred  Monod: 
11  Vit:  six  meditations  sur  le  mystere  chreden,  pp.  280-283. 

^  Compare  M.  Maeterlinck:  L'Ornement  des  Noces  spirituelles  dc 
Ruysbroeck,  Bruxelles,  1891,  Introduction,  p.  xix. 


MYSTICISM  411 

into  pure  water  remains  the  same,  thus,  O  Gautama,  is  the 
Self  of  a  thinker  who  knows.  Water  in  water,  fire  in  fire, 
ether  in  ether,  no  one  can  distinguish  them :  Hkewise  a  man 
whose  mind  has  entered  into  the  Self."  ^  "  'Every  man,'  says 
the  Sufi  Gulshan-Raz,  whose  heart  is  no  longer  shaken  by 
any  doubt,  knows  with  certainty  that  there  is  no  being  save 
only  One.  ...  In  his  divine  majesty  the  me,  and  we,  the 
thou,  are  not  found,  for  in  the  One  there  can  be  no  distinc- 
tion. Every  being  who  is  annulled  and  entirely  separated 
from  himself,  hears  resound  outside  of  him  this  voice  and 
this  echo :  /  am  God:  he  has  an  eternal  way  of  existing,  and 
is  no  longer  subject  to  death.'  "  "  In  the  vision  of  God,  says 
Plotinus,  "what  sees  is  not  our  reason,  but  something  prior 
and  superior  to  our  reason.  .  .  .  He  who  thus  sees  does 
not  properly  see,  does  not  distinguish  or  imagine  two  things. 
He  changes,  he  ceases  to  be  himself,  preserves  nothing  of 
himself.  Absorbed  in  God,  he  makes  but  one  with  him,  like 
a  centre  of  a  circle  coinciding  with  another  centre."  ^  "Here," 
writes  Suso,  "the  spirit  dies,  and  yet  is  all  alive  in  the  mar- 
vels of  the  Godhead  .  .  .  and  is  lost  in  the  stillness  of  the 
glorious  dazzling  obscurity  and  of  the  naked  simple  unity. 
It  is  in  this  modeless  where  that  the  highest  bliss  is  to  be 
found."  ■*  "Ich  bin  so  gross  als  Gott,"  sings  Angelus  Silesius 
again,  "Er  ist  als  ich  so  klein;  Er  kann  nicht  iiber  mich,  ich 
unter  ihm  nicht  sein."  ^  • 

In  mystical  literature  such  self-contradictory  phrases  as 
"dazzling  obscurity,"  "whispering  silence,"  "teeming  desert," 
are  continually  met  with.  They  prove  that  not  conceptual 

^  Upanishads,  M.  Muller's  translation,  ii.  17,  334. 
"ScHMOLDERs:  Op.  cit.,  p.  210. 

^  Enneads,  Bouillier's  translation,  Paris,  1861,  iii.  561.  Ck)mpare 
pp.  473-477.  and  vol.  i.  p.  27. 
''  Autobiography,  pp.  309,  310. 
^  Op.  cit.,  Strophe  10. 


412       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

speech,  but  music  rather,  is  the  element  through  which  we 
arc  best  spoken  to  by  mystical  truth.  Many  mystical  scrip- 
tures are  indeed  little  more  than  musical  compositions. 

"He  who  would  hear  the  voice  of  Nada,  'the  Soundless 
Sound,'  and  comprehend  it,  he  has  to  learn  the  nature  of  Dha- 
rana.  .  .  .  When  to  himself  his  form  appears  unreal,  as  do  on 
waking  all  the  forms  he  sees  in  dreams;  when  he  has  ceased  to 
hear  the  many,  he  may  discern  the  ONE — the  inner  sound 
which  kills  the  outer.  .  .  .  For  then  the  soul  will  hear,  and  will 
remember.  And  then  to  the  inner  ear  will  speak  the  voice  of 
THE  SILENCE.  .  .  .  And  now  thy  Self  is  lost  in  self,  thyself  unto 
THYSELF,  merged  in  that  self  from  which  thou  first  didst  radi- 
ate. .  .  .  Behold!  thou  hast  become  the  Light,  thou  hast  be- 
come the  Sound,  thou  art  thy  Master  and  thy  God.  Thou  art 
thyself  the  object  of  thy  search:  the  voice  unbroken,  that  re- 
sounds throughout  eternities,  exempt  from  change,  from  sin 
exempt,  the  seven  sounds  in  one,  the  voice  of  the  silence.  Om 
tat  Sat."  1 

These  words,  if  they  do  not  awaken  laughter  as  you  re- 
ceive them,  probably  stir  chords  within  you  which  music 
and  language  touch  in  common.  Music  gives  us  ontological 
messages  which  non-musical  criticism  is  unable  to  contra- 
dict, though  it  may  laugh  at  our  foolishness  in  minding 
them.  There  is  a  verge  of  the  mind  which  these  things 
haunt;  and  whispers  therefrom  mingle  with  the  operations 
of  our  understanding,  even  as  the  waters  of  the  infinite 
ocean  send  their  waves  to  break  among  the  pebbles  that  lie 
upon  our  shores. 

"Here  begins  the  sea  that  ends  not  till  the  world's  end.  Where 

we  stand, 
<  ^.ould  we  know  the  next  high  sea-mark  set  beyond  these  waves 

that  gleam, 

*  H.  P.  Blavatsky:  The  Voice  of  the  Silence. 


MYSTICISM  413 

Wc  should  know  what  never  man  hath  known,  nor  eye  of  man 

hath  scanned.  .  .  . 
Ah,  but  here  man's  heart  leaps,  yearning  towards  the  gloom 

with  venturous  glee, 
From  the  shore  that  hath  no  shore  beyond  it,  set  in  all  the 


"  1 
sea.    '■ 


That  doctrine,  for  example,  that  eternity  is  timeless,  that 
our  "immortality,"  if  we  live  in  the  eternal,  is  not  so  much 
future  as  already  now^  and  here,  which  we  find  so  often  ex- 
pressed to-day  in  certain  philosophic  circles,  finds  its  support 
in  a  "hear,  hear!"  or  an  "amen,"  which  floats  up  from  that 
mysteriously  deeper  level."  We  recognize  the  passwords  to 
the  mystical  region  as  we  hear  them,  but  we  cannot  use 
them  ourselves;  it  alone  has  the  keeping  of  "the  password 
primeval."  ^ 

1  have  now  sketched  with  extreme  brevity  and  insuffi- 
ciency, but  as  fairly  as  I  am  able  in  the  rime  allowed,  the 
general  traits  of  the  mystic  range  of  consciousness.  It  is  or. 
the  whole  pantheistic  and  optimistic,  or  at  least  the  opposite 
of  pessimistic.  It  is  anti-naturalistic,  and  harmonizes  best 
with  twice-bornness  and  so-called  other-worldly  states  of 
mind. 

My  next  task  is  to  inquire  whether  we  can  invoke  it  as 
authoritative.  Does  it  furnish  any  warrant  for  the  truth  of 
the  twice-bornness  and  supernaturality  and  pantheism 
which  it  favors.?  I  must  give  my  answer  to  this  question  as 
concisely  as  I  can. 

^  Swinburne:  On  the  Verge,  in  "A  Midsummer  Vacation." 

2  Compare  the  extracts  from  Dr.  Bucke,  quoted  on  pp.  398,  399. 

^  As  serious  an  attempt  as  1  know  to  mediate  between  the  mystical 
region  and  the  discursive  life  is  contained  in  an  article  on  Aristotle's 
Unmoved  Mover,  by  F.  C.  S.  Schiller,  in  Mind,  vol.  ix.,  1900. 


414       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

In  brief  my  answer  is  this — and  I  will  divide  it  into  three 
parts : — 

(i)  Mystical  states,  when  well  developed,  usually  are,  and 
have  the  right  to  be,  absolutely  authoritative  over  the  indi- 
viduals to  whom  they  come. 

(2)  No  authority  emanates  from  them  which  should 
make  it  a  duty  for  those  who  stand  outside  of  them  to  ac- 
cept their  revelations  uncritically. 

(3)  They  break  down  the  authority  of  the  non-mystical 
or  rationalistic  consciousness,  based  upon  the  understand- 
ing and  the  senses  alone.  They  show  it  to  be  only  one  kind 
of  consciousness.  They  open  out  the  possibility  of  other  or- 
ders of  truth,  in  which,  so  far  as  anything  in  us  vitally  re- 
sponds to  them,  we  may  freely  continue  to  have  faith. 

I  will  take  up  these  points  one  by  one. 


As  a  matter  of  psychological  fact,  mystical  states  of  a 
-veil-pronounced  and  emphatic  sort  are  usually  authorita- 
tive over  those  who  have  them.^  They  have  been  "there," 
and  know.  It  is  vain  for  rationalism  to  grumble  about  this. 
If  the  mystical  truth  that  comes  to  a  man  proves  to  be  a 
force  that  he  can  live  by,  what  mandate  have  we  of  the  ma- 
jority to  order  him  to  live  in  another  way?  We  can  throw 
him  into  a  prison  or  a  madhouse,  but  we  cannot  change  his 
mind — we  commonly  attach  it  only  the  more  stubbornly  to 
its  beliefs.^  It  mocks  our  utmost  efforts,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 

^  I  abstract  from  weaker  states,  and  from  those  cases  of  which  the 
books  are  full,  where  the  director  (but  usually  not  the  subject)  re- 
mains in  doubt  whether  the  experience  may  not  have  proceeded  from 
ihe  demon. 

^  Example:  Mr.  John  Nelson  writes  of  his  imprisonment  for  preach- 
ing Methodism:  "My  soul  was  as  a  watered  garden,  and  I  could  sing 
praises  to  God  all  day  long;  for  he  turned  my  capdviry  into  joy,  and 
..^ve  me  to  rest  as  well  on  the  boards,  as  if  I  had  been  on  a  bed  of 


MYSTICISM  415 

and  in  point  of  logic  it  absolutely  escapes  our  jurisdiction. 
Our  own  more  "rational"  beliefs  are  based  on  evidence 
exactly  similar  in  nature  to  that  which  mystics  quote  for 
theirs.  Our  senses,  namely,  have  assured  us  of  certain  states 
of  fact;  but  mystical  experiences  are  as  direct  perceptions  of 
fact  for  those  who  have  them  as  any  sensations  ever  were 
for  us.  The  records  show  that  even  though  the  five  senses  be 
in  abeyance  in  them,  they  are  absolutely  sensational  in  their 
epistemological  quality,  if  I  may  be  pardoned  the  barbarous 
expression — that  is,  they  are  face  to  face  presentations  of 
what  seems  immediately  to  exist. 

The  mystic  is,  in  short,  invulnerable,  and  must  be  left, 
whether  we  relish  it  or  not,  in  undisturbed  enjoyment  o\ 
his  creed.  Faith,  says  Tolstoy,  is  that  by  which  men  live. 
And  faith-state  and  mystic  state  are  practically  convertible 
terms. 

2. 

But  I  now  proceed  to  add  that  mystics  have  no  right  to 
claim  that  we  ought  to  accept  the  deliverance  of  their  pe 
culiar  experiences,  if  we  are  ourselves  outsiders  and  feel  no 
private  call  thereto.  The  utmost  they  can  ever  ask  of  us  in 
this  life  is  to  admit  that  they  establish  a  presumption.  They 
form  a  consensus  and  have  an  unequivocal  outcome;  and  it 
would  be  odd,  mystics  might  say,  if  such  a  unanimous  type 
of  experience  should  prove  to  be  altogether  wrong.  At  bot' 
tom,  however,  this  would  only  be  an  appeal  to  numbers, 
like  the  appeal  of  rationalism  the  other  way;  and  the  appeal 
to  numbers  has  no  logical  force.  If  we  acknowledge  it,  it  if 
for  "suggestive,"  not  for  logical  reasons:  we  follow  the  ma- 
jority because  to  do  so  suits  our  life. 

down.  Now  could  I  say,  'God's  service  is  perfect  freedom,'  and  I  waj 
carried  out  mucli  in  prayer  that  my  enemies  might  drink  of  die  samfl 
river  of  peace  which  my  God  gave  so  largely  to  me."  Journal,  Lon 
don,  no  date,  p.  172. 


4l6       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

But  even  this  presumption  from  the  unanimity  of  mys- 
tics is  far  from  being  strong.  In  characterizing  mystic  states 
an  pantheistic,  optimistic,  etc.,  I  am  afraid  I  over-simpUfied 
the  truth.  I  did  so  for  expository  reasons,  and  to  keep  the 
closer  to  the  classic  mystical  tradition.  The  classic  religious 
mysticism,  it  now  must  be  confessed,  is  only  a  "privileged 
case."  It  is  an  extract,  kept  true  to  type  by  the  selection  of 
the  fittest  specimens  and  their  preservation  in  "schools." 
It  is  carved  out  from  a  much  larger  mass;  and  if  we  take 
the  larger  mass  as  seriously  as  religious  mysticism  has  his- 
torically taken  itself,  we  find  that  the  supposed  unanimity 
largely  disappears.  To  begin  with,  even  religious  mysticism 
itself,  the  kind  that  accumulates  traditions  and  makes 
schools,  is  much  less  unanimous  than  I  have  allowed.  It  has 
been  both  ascetic  and  antinomianly  self-indulgent  within 
the  Christian  church.^  It  is  dualistic  in  Sankhya,  and  monis- 
tic in  Vedanta  philosophy.  I  called  it  pantheistic;  but  the 
great  Spanish  mystics  are  anything  but  pantheists.  They  are 
with  few  exceptions  non-metaphysical  minds,  for  whom 
"the  category  of  personality"  is  absolute.  The  "union"  of 
man  with  God  is  for  them  much  more  like  an  occasional 
miracle  than  like  an  original  identity."  How  different  again, 
apart  from  the  happiness  common  to  all,  is  the  mysticism  of 
Walt  Whitman,  Edward  Carpenter,  Richard  Jefferies,  and 
other  naturalistic  pantheists,  from  the  more  distinctively 
Christian  sort.^  The  fact  is  that  the  mystical  feeling  of  en- 

1  RuYSBROECK,  in  the  work  which  Maeterlinck  has  translated,  has  a 
chapter  against  the  antinomianism  of  disciples.  H.  Delacroix's  book 
(Essai  sur  le  mysticisme  speculatif  en  Allemagne  au  XlVme  Siecle, 
Paris,  1900)  is  full  of  antinomian  material.  Compare  also  A.  Jundt: 
Les  Amis  dc  Dieu  au  XIV  Siecle,  These  de  Strasbourg,  1879. 

2  Compare  Paul  Rousselot:  Les  Mystiques  Espagnols,  Paris,  1869, 

ch.  xii. 

3  See  Carpenter's  Towards  Democracy,  especially  the  latter  parts, 
and  Jefferies's  wonderful  and  splendid  mystic  rhapsody,  The  Story 
of  my  Heart. 


MYSTICISM  417 

largement,  union,  and  emancipation  has  no  specific  intellec- 
tual content  whatever  of  its  own.  It  is  capable  of  forming 
matrimonial  alliances  with  material  furnished  by  the  most 
diverse  philosophies  and  theologies,  provided  only  they  can 
find  a  place  in  their  framework  for  its  peculiar  emotional 
mood.  We  have  no  right,  therefore,  to  invoke  its  prestige  as 
distinctively  in  favor  of  any  special  belief,  such  as  that  in 
absolute  idealism,  or  in  the  absolute  monistic  identity,  or  in 
the  absolute  goodness,  of  the  world.  It  is  only  relatively  in 
favor  of  all  these  things — it  passes  out  of  common  human 
consciousness  in  the  direction  in  which  they  lie. 

So  much  for  religious  mysticism  proper.  But  more  re- 
mains to  be  told,  for  religious  mysticism  is  only  one  half  of 
mysticism.  The  other  half  has  no  accumulated  traditions 
except  those  which  the  text-books  on  insanity  supply.  Open 
any  one  of  these,  and  you  will  find  abundant  cases  in  which 
"mystical  ideas"  are  cited  as  characteristic  symptoms  of  en- 
feebled or  deluded  states  of  mind.  In  delusional  insanity, 
paranoia,  as  they  sometimes  call  it,  we  may  have  a  diabolical 
mysticism,  a  sort  of  religious  mysticism  turned  upside  down- 
The  same  sense  of  ineffable  importance  in  the  smallest 
events,  the  same  texts  and  words  coming  with  new  mean^ 
ings,  the  same  voices  and  visions  and  leadings  and  missions, 
the  same  controlling  by  extraneous  powers;  only  this  time 
the  emotion  is  pessimistic:  instead  of  consolations  we  have 
desolations;  the  meanings  are  dreadful;  and  the  powers  are 
enemies  to  life.  It  is  evident  that  from  the  point  of  view  of 
their  psychological  mechanism,  the  classic  mysticism  and 
these  lower  mysticisms  spring  from  the  same  mental  level, 
from  that  great  subliminal  or  transmarginal  region  of  which 
science  is  beginning  to  admit  the  existence,  but  of  which  so 
little  is  really  known.  That  region  contains  every  kind  of 
matter:  "seraph  and  snake"  abide  there  side  by  side.  To 
come  from  thence  is  no  infallible  credential.  What  comes 
must  be  sifted  and  tested,  and  run  the  gauntlet  of  confron- 


4l8       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

tation  with  the  total  context  of  experience,  just  Hke  what 
comes  from  the  outer  world  of  sense.  Its  value  must  be  as- 
certained by  empirical  methods,  so  long  as  we  are  not  mys- 
tics ourselves. 

Once  more,  then,  I  repeat  that  non-mystics  are  under  no 
obligation  to  acknowledge  in  mystical  states  a  superior 
authority  conferred  on  them  by  their  intrinsic  nature.^ 


Yet,  I  repeat  once  more,  the  existence  of  mystical  states 
absolutely  overthrows 'the  pretension  of  non-mystical  states 
to  be  the  sole  and  ultimate  dictators  of  what  we  may  believe. 
As  a  rule,  mystical  states  merely  add  a  supersensuous  mean- 
ing to  the  ordinary  outward  data  of  consciousness.  They 
are  excitements  like  the  emotions  of  love  or  ambition,  gifts 
to  our  spirit  by  means  of  which  facts  already  objectively  be- 
fore us  fall  into  a  new  expressiveness  and  make  a  new  con- 
nection with  our  active  life.  They  do  not  contradict  these 
facts  as  such,  or  deny  anything  that  our  senses  have  immed- 

^  In  chapter  i.  of  book  ii.  of  his  work  Degeneration,  "Max  Nordau" 
seeks  to  undermine  all  mysticism  by  exposing  the  weakness  of  the 
lower  kinds.  Mysticism  for  him  means  any  sudden  percepdon  of 
hidden  significance  in  things.  He  explains  such  percepdon  by  the 
abundant  uncompleted  associations  which  experiences  may  arouse  in 
a  degenerate  brain.  These  give  to  him  who  has  the  experience  a 
vague  and  vast  sense  of  its  leading  further,  yet  they  awaken  no  defi- 
nite or  useful  consequent  in  his  thought.  The  explanadon  is  a  plausi- 
ble one  for  certain  sorts  of  feeling  of  significance;  and  other  alienists 
(Wernicke,  for  example,  in  his  Grundriss  der  Psychiatric,  Theil  ii., 
Leipzig,  1896)  have  explained  "paranoiac"  condidons  by  a  laming  of 
the  associadon-organ.  But  the  higher  mysdcal  flights,  with  their  posi- 
tiveness  and  abruptness,  are  surely  products  of  no  such  merely  nega- 
tive condirion.  It  seems  far  more  reasonable  to  ascribe  them  to 
inroads  from  the  subconscious  life,  of  the  cerebral  acdvity  correlative 
••o  which  V  e  as  yet  know  nothing. 


MYSTICISM  419 

lately  seized.^  It  is  the  rationalistic  critic  rather  who  plays 
the  part  of  denier  in  the  controversy,  and  his  denials  have 
no  strength,  for  there  never  can  be  a  state  of  facts  to  which 
new  meaning  may  not  truthfully  be  added,  provided  the 
mind  ascend  to  a  more  enveloping  point  of  view.  It  musi 
always  remain  an  open  question  whether  mystical  states 
may  not  possibly  be  such  superior  points  of  vievv^,  windows 
through  which  the  mind  looks  out  upon  a  more  extensive 
and  inclusive  world.  The  difference  of  the  views  seen  from 
the  different  mystical  windows  need  not  prevent  us  from 
entertaining  this  supposition.  The  wider  world  would  in 
that  case  prove  to  have  a  mixed  constitution  like  that  ol 
this  world,  that  is  all.  It  would  have  its  celestial  and  its  in- 
fernal regions,  its  tempting  and  its  saving  moments,  its  valid 
experiences  and  its  counterfeit  ones,  just  as  our  world  ha» 
them;  but  it  would  be  a  wider  world  all  the  same.  We 
should  have  to  use  its  experiences  by  selecting  and  subor- 
dinating and  substituting  just  as  is  our  custom  in  this  ordi- 
nary naturalistic  world;  we  should  be  liable  to  error  just  as 
we  are  now;  yet  the  counting  in  of  that  wider  world  of 
meanings,  and  the  serious  dealing  with  it,  might,  in  spite  o£ 
all  the  perplexity,  be  indispensable  stages  in  our  approach 
to  the  final  fullness  of  the  truth. 

In  this  shape,  I  think,  we  have  to  leave  the  subject.  Mys- 
tical states  indeed  wield  no  authority  due  simply  to  theil 
being  mystical  states.  But  the  higher  ones  among  them  point 
in  directions  to  which  the  religious  sentiments  even  of  non- 
mystical  men  incline.  They  tell  of  the  supremacy  of  the 
ideal,  of  vastness,  of  union,  of  safety,  and  of  rest.  They  offer 
us  hypotheses,  hypotheses  which  we  may  voluntarily  ignore, 

^  They  sometimes  add  subjective  audita  et  visa  to  the  facts,  but  as 
these  are  usually  interpreted  as  transmundane,  they  oblige  no  altera- 
tion in  the  facts  of  sense. 


420       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

but  which  as  thinkers  we  cannot  possibly  upset.  The  super- 
naturahsm  and  optimism  to  which  they  would  persuade  us 
may,  interpreted  in  one  way  or  another,  be  after  all  the  tru- 
est of  insights  into  the  meaning  of  this  life. 

"Oh,  the  little  more,  and  how  much  it  is;  and  the  little 
less,  and  what  worlds  away!"  It  may  be  that  possibility  and 
permission  of  this  sort  are  all  that  are  religious  conscious- 
ness requires  to  live  on.  In  my  last  lecture  I  shall  have  to  try 
to  persuade  you  that  this  is  the  case.  Meanwhile,  however,  I 
am  sure  that  for  many  of  my  readers  this  diet  is  too  slender. 
If  supernaturalism  and  inner  union  with  the  divine  are  true, 
you  think,  then  not  so  much  permission,  as  compulsion  to 
believe,  ought  to  be  found.  Philosophy  has  always  professed 
to  prove  religious  truth  by  coercive  argument;  and  the  con- 
struction of  philosophies  of  this  kind  has  always  been  one 
favorite  function  of  the  religious  life,  if  we  use  this  term  in 
the  large  historic  sense.  But  religious  philosophy  is  an  enor- 
mous subject,  and  in  my  next  lecture  I  can  only  give  that 
brief  glance  at  it  which  my  limits  will  allow. 


Lecture  XVIII 
PHILOSOPHY 

THE  subject  of  Saintliness  left  us  face  to  face  with  the 
question,  Is  the  sense  of  divine  presence  a  sense  of 
anything  objectively  true?  We  turned  first  to  mysticism  for 
an  answer,  and  found  that  although  mysticism  is  entirely 
wilhng  to  corroborate  religion,  it  is  too  private  (and  also  too 
various)  in  its  utterances  to  be  able  to  claim  a  universal 
authority.  But  philosophy  publishes  results  which  claim  to 
be  universally  valid  if  they  are  valid  at  all,  so  we  now  turn 
with  our  question  to  philosophy.  Can  philosophy  stamp  a 
warrant  of  veracity  upon  the  religious  man's  sense  of  the 
divine.? 

I  imagine  that  many  of  you  at  this  point  begin  to  indulge 
in  guesses  at  the  goal  to  which  I  am  tending.  I  have  under- 
mined the  authority  of  mysticism,  you  say,  and  the  next 
thing  I  shall  probably  do  is  to  seek  to  discredit  that  of  phi- 
losophy. Religion,  you  expect  to  hear  me  conclude,  is  nothing 
but  an  affair  of  faith,  based  either  on  vague  sentiment,  or  on 
that  vivid  sense  of  the  reality  of  things  unseen  of  which  in 
my  second  lecture  and  in  the  lecture  on  Mysticism  I  gave  so 
many  examples.  It  is  essentially  private  and  individualistic; 
it  always  exceeds  our  powers  of  formulation;  and  although 
attempts  to  pour  its  contents  into  a  philosophic  mould  will 
probably  always  go  on,  men  being  what  they  are,  yet  these 
attempts  are  always  secondary  processes  which  in  no  way 
add  to  the  authority,  or  warrant  the  veracity,  of  the  senti- 
ments from  which  they  derive  their  own  stimulus  and  bor- 
row whatever  glow  of  conviction  they  may  themselves  pos' 

421 


422       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

sess.  In  short,  you  suspect  that  I  am  planning  to  defend 
feehng  at  the  expense  of  reason,  to  rehabiUtate  the  primitive 
and  unreflective,  and  to  dissuade  you  from  the  hope  of  any 
Theology  worthy  of  the  name. 

To  a  certain  extent  I  have  to  admit  that  you  guess  rightly. 
I  do  believe  that  feeling  is  the  deeper  source  of  religion,  and 
that  philosophic  and  theological  formulas  are  secondary  pro- 
ducts, like  translations  of  a  text  into  another  tongue.  But 
all  such  statements  are  misleading  from  their  brevity,  and 
it  will  take  the  whole  hour  for  me  to  explain  to  you  exactly 
what  I  mean. 

When  I  call  theological  formulas  secondary  products,  I 
mean  that  in  a  world  in  which  no  religious  feeling  had  ever 
existed,  I  doubt  whether  any  philosophic  theology  could  ever 
have  been  framed.  I  doubt  if  dispassionate  intellectual  con- 
templation of  the  universe,  apart  from  inner  unhappiness 
and  need  of  deliverance  on  the  one  hand  and  mystical  emo- 
tion on  the  other,  would  ever  have  resulted  in  religious  phi- 
losophies such  as  we  now  possess.  Men  would  have  begun 
with  animistic  explanations  of  natural  fact,  and  criticised 
these  away  into  scientific  ones,  as  they  actually  have  done. 
In  the  science  they  would  have  left  a  certain  amount  of 
"psychical  research,"  even  as  they  now  will  probably  have 
to  re-admit  a  certain  amount.  But  high-flying  speculations 
like  those  of  either  dogmatic  or  idealistic  theology,  these 
they  would  have  had  no  motive  to  venture  on,  feeling  no 
need  of  commerce  with  such  deities.  These  speculations 
must,  it  seems  to  me,  be  classed  as  over-beliefs,  buildings- 
out  performed  by  the  intellect  into  directions  of  which 
feeling  originally  supplied  the  hint. 

But  even  if  religious  philosophy  had  to  have  its  first  hint 
supplied  by  feeling,  may  it  not  have  dealt  in  a  superior  way 
with  the  matter  which  feeling  suggested  ?  Feeling  is  private 
and  dumb,  and  unable  to  give  an  account  of  itself.  It  allows 
that  its  results  are  mysteries  and  enigmas,  declines  to  justify 


PHILOSOPHY  423 

them  rationally,  and  on  occasion  is  willing  that  they  should 
even  pass  for  paradoxical  and  absurd.  Philosophy  takes  just 
the  opposite  attitude.  Her  aspiration  is  to  reclaim  from  mys- 
tery and  paradox  whatever  territory  she  touches.  To  find  an 
escape  from  obscure  and  wayward  personal  persuasion  to 
truth  objectively  valid  for  all  thinking  men  has  ever  been 
the  intellect's  most  cherished  ideal.  To  redeem  religion  from 
unwholesome  privacy,  and  to  give  public  status  and  uni- 
versal right  of  way  to  its  deliverances,  has  been  reason's  task. 

I  believe  that  philosophy  will  always  have  opportunity 
to  labor  at  this  task.^  We  are  thinking  beings,  and  we  can- 
not exclude  the  intellect  from  participating  in  any  of  our 
functions.  Even  in  soliloquizing  with  ourselves,  we  con- 
strue our  feelings  intellectually.  Both  our  personal  ideals  and 
our  religious  and  mystical  experiences  must  be  interpreted 
congruously  with  the  kind  of  scenery  which  our  thinking 
mind  inhabits.  The  philosophic  climate  of  our  time  inevi- 
tably forces  its  own  clothing  on  us.  Moreover,  we  must  ex- 
change our  feelings  with  one  another,  and  in  doing  so  we 
have  to  speak,  and  to  use  general  and  abstract  verbal  formu- 
las. Conceptions  and  constructions  are  thus  a  necessary  part 
of  our  religion;  and  as  moderator  amid  the  clash  of  hypoth- 
eses, and  mediator  among  the  criticisms  of  one  man's 
constructions  by  another,  philosophy  will  always  have  much 
to  do.  It  would  be  strange  if  I  disputed  this,  when  these 
very  lectures  which  I  am  giving  are  (as  you  will  see  more 
clearly  from  now  onwards)  a  laborious  attempt  to  extract 
from  the  privacies  of  religious  experience  some  general  facts 
which  can  be  defined  in  formulas  upon  which  everybody 
may  agree. 

Religious  experience,  in  other  words,  spontaneously  and 
inevitably  engenders  myths,  superstitions,  dogmas,  creeds, 
and  metaphysical  theologies,  and  criticisms  of  one  set  of 

^  Compare  Professor  W.  Wallace's  Gifford  Lectures,  in  Lectures 
and  Essays,  Oxford,  1898,  pp.  17  fl. 


424       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

these  by  the  adherents  of  another.  Of  late,  impartial  classi- 
fications and  comparisons  have  become  possible,  alongside 
of  the  denunciations  and  anathemas  by  which  the  commerce 
between  creeds  used  exclusively  to  be  carried  on.  We  have 
the  beginnings  of  a  "Science  of  Religions,"  so-called;  and  if 
these  lectures  could  ever  be  accounted  a  crumb-like  contri- 
bution to  such  a  science,  I  should  be  made  very  happy. 

But  all  these  intellectual  operations,  whether  they  be  con- 
structive or  comparative  and  critical,  presuppose  immediate 
experiences  as  their  subject-matter.  They  are  interpretative 
and  inductive  operations,  operations  after  the  fact,  conse- 
quent upon  religious  feeling,  not  coordinate  with  it,  not 
independent  of  what  it  ascertains. 

The  intellectualism  in  religion  which  I  wish  to  discredit 
pretends  to  be  something  altogether  different  from  this.  It 
assumes  to  construct  religious  objects  out  of  the  resources 
of  logical  reason  alone,  or  of  logical  reason  drawing  rigorous 
inference  from  non-subjective  facts.  It  calls  its  conclusions 
dogmatic  theology,  or  philosophy  of  the  absolute,  as  the 
case  may  be;  it  does  not  call  them  science  of  religions.  It 
reaches  them  in  an  a  priori  way,  and  warrants  their  veracity. 

Warranted  systems  have  ever  been  the  idols  of  aspiring 
souls.  All-inclusive,  yet  simple;  noble,  clean,  luminous, 
stable,  rigorous,  true;— what  more  ideal  refuge  could  there 
be  than  such  a  system  would  offer  to  spirits  vexed  by  the 
muddiness  and  accidentality  of  the  world  of  sensible  things.? 
Accordingly,  we  find  inculcated  in  the  theological  schools  of 
to-day,  almost  as  much  as  in  those  of  the  fore-time,  a  dis- 
dain for  merely  possible  or  probable  truth,  and  of  results 
that  only  private  assurance  can  grasp.  Scholastics  and  ideal- 
ists both  express  this  disdain.  Principal  John  Caird,  for  ex- 
ample, writes  as  follows  in  his  Introduction  to  the  Philoso- 
phy of  Religion: — 


PHILOSOPHY  425 

"Religion  must  indeed  be  a  thing  of  the  heart;  but  in  order 
to  elevate  it  from  the  region  of  subjective  caprice  and  wayward- 
ness, and  to  distinguish  between  that  which  is  true  and  false  in 
religion,  we  must  appeal  to  an  objective  standard.  That  which 
enters  the  heart  must  first  be  discerned  by  the  intelligence  to  be 
true.  It  must  be  seen  as  having  in  its  own  nature  a  right  to  dom- 
inate feeling,  and  as  constituting  the  principle  by  which  feeling 
must  be  judged.^  In  estimating  the  religious  character  of  indi- 
viduals, nations,  or  races,  the  first  question  is,  not  how  they  feel, 
but  what  they  think  and  believe — not  whether  their  religion  is 
one  which  manifests  itself  in  emotions,  more  or  less  vehement 
and  enthusiastic,  but  what  are  the  conceptions  of  God  and  di- 
vine things  by  which  these  emotions  are  called  forth.  Feeling  is 
necessary  in  religion,  but  it  is  by  the  content  or  intelligent  basis 
of  a  religion,  and  not  by  feeling,  that  its  character  and  worth 
are  to  be  determined."  ^ 

Cardinal  Newman,  in  his  work,  The  Idea  of  a  Univer- 
sity, gives  more  emphatic  expression  still  to  this  disdain  for 
sentiment.^  Theology,  he  says,  is  a  science  in  the  strictest 
sense  of  the  word.  I  will  tell  you,  he  says,  what  it  is  not — 
not  "physical  evidences"  for  God,  not  "natural  religion," 
for  these  are  but  vague  subjective  interpretations: — 

"If,"  he  continues,  "the  Supreme  Being  is  powerful  or  skill- 
ful, just  so  far  as  the  telescope  shows  power,  or  the  microscope 
shows  skill,  if  his  moral  law  is  to  be  ascertained  simply  by  the 
physical  processes  of  the  animal  frame,  or  his  will  gathered 
from  the  immediate  issues  of  human  affairs,  if  his  Essence  is 
just  as  high  and  deep  and  broad  as  the  universe  and  no  more; 
if  this  be  the  fact,  then  will  I  confess  that  there  is  no  specific 
science  about  God,  that  theology  is  but  a  name,  and  a  protest  in 
its  behalf  an  hypocrisy.  Then,  pious  as  it  is  to  think  of  Him, 
while  the  pageant  of  experiment  or  abstract  reasoning  passes  by, 

^  Op.  cit.,  p.  174,  abridged. 

-  Ibid.,  p.  186,  abridged  and  italicized. 

•''  Discourse  II.  §  7. 


426       THt   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Still  such  piety  is  nothing  more  than  a  poetry  of  thought,  or  an 
ornament  of  language,  a  certain  view  taken  of  Nature  which 
one  man  has  and  another  has  not,  which  gifted  minds  strike 
out,  which  others  see  to  be  admirable  and  ingenious,  and  which 
all  would  be  the  better  for  adopting.  It  is  but  the  theology  of 
Nature,  just  as  we  talk  of  the  philosophy  or  the  romance  of  his- 
tory, or  the  poetry  of  childhood,  or  the  picturesque  or  the  sen- 
timental or  the  humorous,  or  any  other  abstract  quality  which 
the  genius  or  the  caprice  of  the  individual,  or  the  fashion  of  the 
(lay,  or  the  consent  of  the  world,  recognizes  in  any  set  of  objects 
which  are  subjected  to  its  contemplation.  I  do  not  see  much 
difference  between  avowing  that  there  is  no  God,  and  implying 
I  hat  nothing  definite  can  be  known  for  certain  about  Him." 

What  I  mean  by  Theology,  continues  Newman,  is  none  of 
these  things:  "I  simply  mean  the  Science  of  God,  or  the  truths 
we  know  about  God,  put  into  a  system,  just  as  we  have  a  science 
of  the  stars  and  call  it  astronomy,  or  of  the  crust  of  the  earth 
and  call  it  geology." 

In  both  these  extracts  we  have  the  issue  clearly  set  be- 
fore us:  Feeling  valid  only  for  the  individual  is  pitted 
against  reason  valid  universally.  The  test  is  a  perfectly  plain 
one  of  fact.  Theology  based  on  pure  rea.son  must  in  point 
of  fact  convince  men  universally.  If  it  did  not,  wherein 
would  its  superiority  consist?  If  it  only  formed  sects  and 
schools,  even  as  sentiment  and  mysticism  form  them,  how 
would  it  fulfill  its  programme  of  freeing  us  from  personal 
caprice  and  waywardness?  This  perfectly  definite  practical 
test  of  the  pretensions  of  philosophy  to  found  religion  on 
universal  reason  simplifies  my  procedure  to-day.  I  need  not 
discredit  philosophy  by  laborious  criticism  of  its  arguments. 
It  will  suffice  if  I  show  that  as  a  matter  of  history  it  fails  to 
prove  its  pretension  to  be  "objectively"  convincing.  In  fact, 
philosophy  does  so  fail.  It  does  not  banish  differences;  it 
founds  schools  and  sects  just  as  feeling  does.  I  believe,  in 
fact,  that  the  logical  reason  of  man  operates  in  this  field  of 
divinity  exactly  as  it  has  always  operated  in  love,  or  in 


I 


PHILOSOPHY  427 

patriotism,  or  in  politics,  or  in  any  other  of  the  wider  affairs 
of  hfe,  in  which  our  passions  or  our  mystical  intuitions  fix 
our  beliefs  beforehand.  It  finds  arguments  for  our  convic- 
tion, for  indeed  it  has  to  find  them.  It  amplifies  and  de- 
fines our  faith,  and  dignifies  it  and  lends  it  words  and  plaus- 
ibility. It  hardly  ever  engenders  it;  it  cannot  now  secure  it.^ 

Lend  me  your  attention  while  I  run  through  some  of  the 
points  of  the  older  systematic  theology.  You  find  them  in 
both  Protestant  and  Catholic  manuals,  best  of  all  ni  the 
innumerable  text-books  published  since  Pope  Leo's  Encycli- 
cal recommending  the  study  of  Saint  Thomas.  I  glance  first 
at  the  arguments  by  which  dogmatic  theology  establishes 
God's  existence,  after  that  at  those  by  which  it  establishes 
his  nature.' 

The  arguments  for  God's  existence  have  stood  for  hun- 
dreds of  years  with  the  waves  of  unbelieving  criticism  break- 
ing against  them,  never  totally  discrediting  them  in  the  ears 
of  the  faithful,  but  on  the  whole  slowly  and  surely  washing 
out  the  mortar  from  between  their  joints.  If  you  have  a  God 

^  As  regards  the  secondary  character  of  intellectual  constructions, 
and  the  primacy  of  feeling  and  instinct  in  founding  religious  beliefs, 
see  the  striking  work  of  H.  Fielding,  The  Hearts  of  Men,  London, 
1902,  which  came  into  my  hands  after  my  text  was  written.  "Creeds," 
says  the  author,  "are  the  grammar  of  religion,  they  are  to  religion 
what  grammar  is  to  speech.  Words"  are  the  expression  of  our  wants; 
grammar  is  the  theory  formed  afterwards.  Speech  never  proceeded 
from  grammar,  but  the  reverse.  As  speech  progresses  and  changes 
from  unknown  causes,  grammar  must  follow"  (p.  313).  The  whole 
book,  which  keeps  unusually  close  to  concrete  facts,  is  little  more 
than  an  amplification  of  this  text. 

^  For  convenience'  sake,  I  follow  the  order  of  A.  Stockl's  Lehr- 
buch  der  Philosophic,  5te  Auflage,  Mainz,  1881,  Band  ii.  B.  Boedder's 
Natural  Theology,  London,  1891,  is  a  handy  English  Catholic  Man 
ual;  but  an  almost  identical  doctrine  is  given  by  such  Protestant  the- 
ologians as  C.  Hodge:  Systemadc  Theology,  New  York,  1873,  or  A 
H.  Strong:  Systemadc  Theology,  5th  edition.  New  York,  1896. 


428       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

ilready  whom  you  believe  in,  these  arguments  confirm  you. 
If  you  are  atheistic,  they  fail  to  set  you  right.  The  proofs  are 
various.  The  "cosmological"  one,  so-called,  reasons  from 
the  contingence  of  the  world  to  a  First  Cause  which  must 
contain  whatever  perfections  the  world  itself  contains.  The 
"argument  from  design"  reasons,  from  the  fact  that  Nature's 
laws  are  mathematical,  and  her  parts  benevolently  adapted 
to  each  other,  that  this  cause  is  both  intellectual  and  benevo- 
lent. The  "moral  argument"  is  that  the  moral  law  presup- 
poses a  lawgiver.  The  "argument  ex  consensu  gentium''  is 
that  the  belief  in  God  is  so  widespread  as  to  be  grounded  in 
jhe  rational  nature  of  man,  and  should  therefore  carry  au- 
thority with  it. 

As  I  just  said,  I  will  not  discuss  these  arguments  tech- 
nically. The  bare  fact  that  all  idealists  since  Kant  have  felt 
entitled  either  to  scout  or  to  neglect  them  shows  that  they 
are  not  solid  enough  to  serve  as  religion's  all-sufficient  foun- 
dation. Absolutely  impersonal  reasons  would  be  in  duty 
bound  to  show  more  general  convincingness.  Causation  is 
indeed  too  obscure  a  principle  to  bear  the  weight  of  the 
whole  structure  of  theology.  As  for  the  argument  from  de- 
sign, see  how  Darwinian  ideas  have  revolutionized  it.  Con- 
ceived as  we  now  conceive  them,  as  so  many  fortunate  es- 
capes from  almost  limitless  processes  of  destruction,  the 
benevolent  adaptations  which  we  find  in  Nature  suggest  a 
deity  very  different  from  the  one  who  figured  in  the  earlier 
versions  of  the  argument.-^  The  fact  is  that  these  arguments 

^  It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  any  form  of  J/j-order  in  the  world 
might,  by  the  design  argument,  suggest  a  God  for  just  that  kind  of 
disorder.  The  truth  is  that  any  state  of  things  whatever  that  can  be 
named  is  logically  susceptible  of  teleological  interpretation.  The  ruins 
of  the  earthquake  at  Lisbon,  for  example:  the  whole  of  past  history 
had  to  be  planned  exactly  as  it  was  to  bring  about  in  the  fullness  of 
ume  just  that  particular  arrangement  of  debris  of  masonry,  furniture, 
and  once  living  bodies.  No  other  train  of  causes  would  have  been  suf- 
ficient. And  so  of  any  other  arrangement,  bad  or  good,  which  might 


PHILOSOPHY  429 

do  but  follow  the  combined  suggestions  of  the  facts  and  of 
our  feeling.  They  prove  nothing  rigorously.  They  only  cor- 
roborate our  preexistent  partialities. 

as  a  matter  of  fact  be  found  resulting  anywhere  from  previous  con- 
ditions. To  avoid  such  pessimistic  consequences  and  save  its  bene- 
ficent designer,  the  design  argument  accordingly  invokes  two  other 
principles,  restrictive  in  their  operation.  The  first  is  physical:  Na- 
ture's forces  tend  of  their  own  accord  only  to  disorder  and  destruc- 
tion, to  heaps  of  ruins,  not  to  architecture.  This  principle,  though 
plausible  at  first  sight,  seems,  in  the  hght  of  recent  biology,  to  be 
more  and  more  improbable.  The  second  principle  is  one  of  anthropo- 
morphic interpretation.  No  arrangement  that  for  us  is  "disorderly" 
can  possibly  have  been  an  object  of  design  at  all.  This  principle  is  ol 
course  a  mere  assumption  in  the  interests  of  anthropomorphic 
Theism. 

When  one  views  the  world  with  no  definite  theological  bias  one 
way  or  the  other,  one  sees  that  order  and  disorder,  as  we  now  recog- 
nize them,  are  purely  human  inventions.  We  are  interested  in  certain 
types  of  arrangement,  useful,  aesthetic,  or  moral — so  interested  that 
whenever  we  find  them  realized,  the  fact  emphatically  rivets  our  at- 
tention. The  result  is  that  we  work  over  the  contents  of  the  world 
selectively.  It  is  overflowing  with  disorderly  arrangements  from  our 
point  of  view,  but  order  is  the  only  thing  we  care  for  and  look  at, 
and  by  choosing,  one  can  always  find  some  sort  of  orderly  arrange- 
ment in  the  midst  of  any  chaos.  If  I  should  throw  down  a  thousand 
beans  at  random  upon  a  table,  I  could  doubdess,  by  eliminating  a 
sufficient  number  of  them,  leave  the  rest  in  almost  any  geometrical 
[)attern  you  might  propose  to  me,  and  you  might  then  say  that  that 
pattern  was  the  thing  prefigured  beforehand,  and  that  the  other 
beans  were  mere  irrelevance  and  packing  material.  Our  dealings 
with  Nature  are  just  like  this.  She  is  a  vast  plcntim  in'  which  our 
attention  draws  capricious  lines  in  innumerable  directions.  We  count 
and  name  whatever  lies  upon  the  special  lines  we  trace,  whilst  the 
other  things  and  the  untraced  lines  are  neither  named  nor  counted. 
There  are  in  reality  infinitely  more  things  "unadapted"  to  each 
odier  in  this  world  than  there  are  things  "adapted";  infinitely  more 
things  with  irregular  relations  than  with  regular  relations  between 
them.  But  we  look  for  the  regular  kind  of  thing  exclusively,  and  in- 
geniously discover  and  preserve  it  in  our  memory.  It  accumulates 
with  other  regular  kinds,  until  the  collection  of  them  fills  our  en- 
cyclopsedias.  Yet  all  the  while  between  and  around  them  lies  an 


430       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

If  philosophy  can  do  so  httle  to  establish  God's  existence, 
how  stands  it  with  her  efforts  to  define  his  attributes?  It  is 
worth  while  to  look  at  the  attempts  of  systematic  theology 
in  this  direction. 

Since  God  is  First  Cause,  this  science  of  sciences  says,  he  dif- 
fers from  all  his  creatures  in  possessing  existence  a  se.  From  this 
"a-se-ity"  on  God's  part,  theology  deduces  by  mere  logic  most  of 
his  other  perfections.  For  instance,  he  must  be  both  necessary 
and  absolute,  cannot  not  be,  and  cannot  in  any  way  be  deter- 
mined by  anything  else.  This  makes  Him  absolutely  unlimited 
from  without,  and  unlimited  also  from  within;  for  limitation  is 
non-being;  and  God  is  being  itself.  This  unlimitedness  makes 
God  infinitely  perfect.  Moreover,  God  is  Gne,  and  Only,  for  the 
infinitely  perfect  can  admit  no  peer.  He  is  Spiritual,  for  were 
He  composed  of  physical  parts,  some  other  power  would  have 
to  combine  them  into  the  total,  and  his  aseity  would  thus  be 
contradicted.  He  is  therefore  both  simple  and  non-physical  in 
nature.  He  is  simple  metaphysically  also,  that  is  to  say,  his  na- 
ture and  his  existence  cannot  be  distinct,  as  they  are  in  finite 
substances  which  share  their  formal  natures  with  one  another, 
and  are  individual  only  in  their  material  aspect.  Since  God  is 
one  and  only,  his  essentia  and  his  esse  must  be  given  at  one 
5troke.  This  excludes  from  his  being  all  those  distinctions,  so 
familiar  in  the  world  of  finite  things,  between  potentiality  and 
actuality,  substance  and  accidents,  being  and  activity,  existence 
and  attributes.  We  can  talk,  it  is  true,  of  God's  powers,  acts, 
and  attributes,  but  these  discriminations  are  only  "virtual,"  and 
made  from  the  human  point  of  view.  In  God  all  these  points  of 
view  fall  into  an  absolute  identity  of  being. 

infinite  anonymous  chaos  of  objects  that  no  one  ever  thought  of  to- 
gether, of  relations  that  never  yet  attracted  our  attention. 

The  facts  of  order  from  which  the  physico-theological  argument 
starts  are  thus  easily  susceptible  of  interpretation  as  arbitrary  human 
products.  So  long  as  tliis  is  the  case,  although  of  course  no  argument 
i.gainst  God  follows,  it  follows  that  the  argument  for  him  will  fail  to 
constitute  a  knockdown  proof  of  his  existence.  It  will  be  convincing 
only  to  those  who  on  other  grounds  believe  in  him  already. 


PHILOSOPHY  431 

This  absence  of  all  potentiality  in  God  obliges  Him  to  be 
immutable.  He  is  actuality,  through  and  through.  Were  there 
anything  potential  about  Him,  He  would  either  lose  or  gain  by 
its  actualization,  and  either  loss  or  gain  would  contradict  his 
perfection.  He  cannot,  therefore,  change.  Furthermore,  He  is 
immense,  boundless;  for  couM  He  be  outlined  in  space,  He 
would  be  composite,  and  this  would  contradict  his  indivisibility. 
He  is  therefore  omnipresent,  indivisibly  there,  at  every  point  of 
space.  He  is  similarly  wholly  present  at  every  point  of  time  —in 
other  words  eternal.  For  if  He  began  in  time.  He  would  need  9 
prior  cause,  and  that  would  contradict  his  aseity.  If  He  ended, 
it  would  contradict  his  necessity.  If  He  went  through  any  sue- 
cession,  it  would  contradict  his  immutability. 

He  has  intelligence  and  will  and  every  other  creature-perfec- 
tion, for  we  have  them,  and  effectus  nequit  superare  causam.  In 
Him,  however,  they  are  absolutely  and  eternally  in  act,  and 
their  object,  since  God  can  be  bounded  by  naught  that  is  exter- 
nal, can  primarily  be  nothing  else  than  God  himself.  He  knows 
himself,  then,  in  one  eternal  indivisible  act,  and  wills  himself 
with  an  infinite  self-pleasure.^  Since  He  must  of  logical  neces- 
sity thus  love  and  will  himself,  He  cannot  be  called  "free"  ad 
intra,  with  the  freedom  of  contrarieties  that  characterizes  finite 
creatures.  Ad  extra,  however,  or  with  respect  to  his  creation, 
God  is  free.  He  cannot  need  to  create,  being  perfect  in  being 
and  in  happiness  already.  He  wills  to  create,  then,  by  an  abso- 
lute freedom. 

Being  thus  a  substance  endowed  with  intellect  and  will  and 
freedom,  God  is  a  person;  and  a  living  person  also,  for  He  is 
both  object  and  subject  of  his  own  activity,  and  to  be  this  dis- 
tinguishes the  living  from  the  lifeless.  He  is  thus  absolutely  sel^- 
sufficient:  his  self-knowledge  and  self-love  are  both  of  them  in- 
finite and  adequate,  and  need  no  extraneous  conditions  to  per- 
fect them. 

He  is  omniscient,  for  in  knowing  himself  as  Cause  He  knows 
all  creature  things  and  events  by  implication.  His  knowledge  is 
previsive,  for  He  is  present  to  all  time.  Even  our  free  acts  are 

*  For  the  scholastics  the  facultas  appetendi  embraces  feeling,  desire, 
and  vnW. 


432       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXP-.RIENCE 

known  beforehand  to  Him,  for  otherwise  his  wisdom  would 
admit  of  successive  moments  of  enrichment,  and  this  would 
contradict  his  immutability.  He  is  omnipotent  for  everything 
that  does  not  involve  logical  contradiction.  He  can  make  being 
— in  other  words  his  power  includes  creation.  If  what  He  cre- 
ates were  made  of  his  own  substance,  it  would  have  to  be  infi- 
nite in  essence,  as  that  substance  is;  but  it  is  finite;  so  it  must  be 
non-divine  in  substance.  If  it  were  made  of  a  substance,  an  eter- 
nally existing  matter,  for  example,  which  God  found  there  to 
his  hand,  and  to  which  He  simply  gave  its  form,  that  would 
contradict  God's  definition  as  First  Cause,  and  make  Him  a 
mere  mover  of  something  caused  already.  The  things  he  creates, 
then,  He  creates  ex  nihilo,  and  gives  them  absolute  being  as  so 
many  finite  substances  additional  to  himself.  The  forms  which 
he  imprints  upon  them  have  their  prototypes  in  his  ideas.  But 
AS  in  God  there  is  no  such  thing  as  multiplicity,  and  as  these 
ideas  for  us  are  manifold,  we  must  distinguish  the  ideas  as  they 
are  in  God  and  the  way  in  which  our  minds  externally  imitate 
them.  We  must  attribute  them  to  Him  only  in  a  terminative 
sense,  as  differing  aspects,  from  the  finite  point  of  view,  of  his 
unique  essence. 

God  of  course  is  holy,  good,  and  just.  He  can  do  no  evil,  for 
He  is  positive  being's  fullness,  and  evil  is  negation.  It  is  true 
that  He  has  created  physical  evil  in  places,  but  only  as  a  means 
of  wider  good,  for  bonum  totius  prceeminet  bonum  partis. 
Moral  evil  He  cannot  will,  either  as  end  or  means,  for  that 
would  contradict  his  holiness.  By  creating  free  beings  He  per- 
mits it  only,  neither  his  justice  nor  his  goodness  obliging  Him 
to  prevent  the  recipients  of  freedom  from  misusing  the  gift. 

As  regards  God's  purpose  in  creating,  primarily  it  can  only 
have  been  to  exercise  his  absolute  freedom  by  the  manifestation 
to  others  of  his  glory.  From  this  it  follows  that  the  others  must 
be  rational  beings,  capable  in  the  first  place  of  knowledge,  love, 
and  honor,  and  in  the  second  place  of  happiness,  for  the  knowl- 
edge and  love  of  God  is  the  mainspring  of  felicity.  In  so  far 
forth  one  may  say  that  God's  secondary  purpose  in  creating  ir 
love. 


PHILOSOPHY  433 

I  will  not  weary  you  by  pursuing  these  metaphysical  de- 
terminations farther,  into  the  mysteries  of  God's  Trinity,  for 
example.  What  I  have  given  will  serve  as  a  specimen  of  the 
orthodox  philosophical  theology  of  both  Cathohcs  and 
Protestants.  Newman,  filled  with  enthusiasm  at  God's  list  of 
perfections,  continues  the  passage  which  I  began  to  quote 
to  you  by  a  couple  of  pages  of  a  rhetoric  so  magnificent  that 
I  can  hardly  refrain  from  adding  them,  in  spite  of  the  in- 
road they  would  make  upon  our  time.^  He  first  enumerates 
God's  attributes  sonorously,  then  celebrates  his  ownership 
of  everything  in  earth  and  Heaven,  and  the  dependence  of 
all  that  happens  upon  his  permissive  will.  He  gives  us 
scholastic  philosophy  "touched  with  emotion,"  and  every 
philosophy  should  be  touched  with  emotion  to  be  rightly 
understood.  Emotionally,  then,  dogmatic  theology  is  worth 
something  to  minds  of  the  type  of  Newman's.  It  will  aid  us 
to  estimate  what  it  is  worth  intellectually,  if  at  this  point  I 
make  a  short  digression. 

What  God  hath  joined  together,  let  no  man  put  asunder. 
The  Gontinental  schools  of  philosophy  have  too  often  over- 
looked the  fact  that  man's  thinking  is  organically  connect- 
ed with  his  conduct.  It  seems  to  me  to  be  the  chief  glory 
of  Enghsh  and  Scottish  thinkers  to  have  kept  the  organic 
connection  in  view.  The  guiding  principle  of  British  phi- 
losophy has  in  fact  been  that  every  difference  must  make  a 
difference,  every  theoretical  difference  somewhere  issue  in  a 
practical  difference,  and  that  the  best  method  of  discussing 
points  of  theory  is  to  begin  by  ascertaining  what  practical 
difference  would  result  from  one  alternative  or  the  other 
being  true.  What  is  the  particular  truth  in  question  known 
as?  In  what  facts  does  it  result.''  What  is  its  cash-value  in 

^  Op.  cit.,  Discourse  III.  §  7. 


434       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

terms  o£  particular  experience?  This  is  the  characteristic 
EngHsh  way  of  taking  up  a  question.  In  this  way,  you  re- 
member, Locke  takes  up  the  question  of  personal  identity. 
What  you  mean  by  it  is  just  your  chain  of  particular  mem- 
ories, says  he.  That  is  the  only  concretely  verifiable  part  of 
its  significance.  All  further  ideas  about  it,  such  as  the  one- 
ness or  manyness  of  the  spiritual  substance  on  which  it  is 
based,  are  therefore  void  of  intelligible  meaning;  and  prop- 
ositions touching  such  ideas  may  be  indift'erently  affirmed 
or  denied.  So  Berkeley  with  his  "matter."  The  cash-value  of 
matter  is  our  physical  sensations.  That  is  what  it  is  known 
as,  all  that  we  concretely  verify  of  its  conception.  That, 
therefore,  is  the  whole  meaning  of  the  term  "matter" — any 
other  pretended  meaning  is  mere  wind  of  words.  Hume 
does  the  same  thing  with  causation.  It  is  known  as  habitual 
antecedence,  and  as  tendency  on  our  part  to  look  for  some- 
thing definite  to  come.  Apart  from  this  practical  meaning 
it  has  no  significance  whatever,  and  books  about  it  may 
be  committed  to  the  flames,  says  Hume.  Dugald  Stewart 
and  Thomas  Brown,  James  Mill,  John  Mill,  and  Profes- 
sor Bain,  have  followed  more  or  less  consistently  the  same 
method;  and  Shadworth  Hodgson  has  used  the  princi- 
ple with  full  explicitness.  When  all  is  said  and  done,  it  was 
English  and  Scotch  writers,  and  not  Kant,  who  introduced 
"the  critical  method"  into  philosophy,  the  one  method  fitted 
to  make  philosophy  a  study  worthy  of  serious  men.  For  what 
seriousness  can  possibly  remain  in  debating  philosophic 
propositions  that  will  never  make  an  appreciable  difference 
to  us  in  action?  And  what  could  it  matter,  if  all  proposi- 
tions were  practically  indifferent,  which  of  them  we  should 
agree  to  call  true  or  which  false? 

An  American  philosopher  of  eminent  originality,  Mr. 
Charles  Sanders  Peirce,  has  rendered  thought  a  service  by 
disentangling  from  the  particulars  of  its  application  the 
principle  by  which  these  men  were  instinctively  guided,  and 


PHILOSOPHY  435 

by  singling  it  out  as  fundamental  and  giving  to  it  a  Greek 
name.  He  calls  it  the  principle  of  pragmatism,  and  he  de- 
fends it  somewhat  as  follows :  "^  — 

Thought  in  movement  has  for  its  only  conceivable  mo- 
tive the  attainment  of  belief,  or  thought  at  rest.  Only  when 
our  thought  about  a  subject  has  found  its  rest  in  belief  can 
our  action  on  the  subject  firmly  and  safely  begin.  Beliefs,  in 
short,  are  rules  for  action;  and  the  whole  function  of  thinks 
ing  is  but  one  step  in  the  production  of  active  habits.  If 
there  were  any  part  of  a  thought  that  made  no  difference  in 
the  thought's  practical  consequences,  then  that  part  would 
be  no  proper  element  of  the  thought's  significance.  To  de- 
velop a  thought's  meaning  we  need  therefore  only  deter- 
mine what  conduct  it  is  fitted  to  produce;  that  conduct  is 
for  us  its  sole  significance;  and  the  tangible  fact  at  the  root 
of  all  our  thought-distinctions  is  that  there  is  no  one  of  them 
so  fine  as  to  consist  in  anything  but  a  possible  difference  of 
practice.  To  attain  perfect  clearness  in  our  thoughts  of  an 
object,  we  need  then  only  consider  what  sensations,  immed- 
iate or  remote,  we  are  conceivably  to  expect  from  it,  and 
what  conduct  we  must  prepare  in  case  the  object  should  be 
true.  Our  conception  of  these  practical  consequences  is  for 
us  the  whole  of  our  conception  of  the  object,  so  far  as  that 
conception  has  positive  significance  at  all. 

This  is  the  principle  of  Peirce,  the  principle  of  pragma- 
tism. Such  a  principle  will  help  us  on  this  occasion  to  de- 
cide, among  the  various  attributes  set  down  in  the  scholas- 
tic inventory  of  God's  perfections,  whether  some  be  not  far 
less  significant  than  others. 

If,  namely,  we  apply  the  principle  of  pragmatism  to  God's 
metaphysical  attributes,  strictly  so  called,  as  distinguished 
from  his  moral  attributes,  I  think  that,  even  were  we  forced 
by  a  coercive  logic  to  believe  them,  we  still  should  have  to 

In  an  article,  How  to  make  our  Ideas  Clear,  in  the  Popular  Science 
Monthly  for  January,  1878,  vol.  xii.  p.  286. 


436      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

confess  them  to  be  destitute  of  all  intelligible  significance. 
Take  God's  aseity,  for  example;  or  his  necessariness;  his 
immateriality;  his  "simplicity"  or  superiority  to  the  kind  of 
inner  variety  and  succession  which  we  find  in  finite  beings, 
his  indivisibility,  and  lack  of  the  inner  distinctions  of  be- 
ing and  activity,  substance  and  accident,  potentiality  and 
actuality,  and  the  rest;  his  repudiation  of  inclusion  in  a 
genus;  his  actualized  infinity;  his  "personality,"  apart  from 
the  moral  qualities  which  it  may  comport;  his  relations  to 
evil  being  permissive  and  not  positive;  his  self-sufficiency, 
self-love,  and  absolute  felicity  in  himself: — candidly  speak- 
ing, how  do  such  qualities  as  these  make  any  definite  con- 
nection with  our  life?  And  if  they  severally  call  for  no  dis- 
tinctive adaptations  of  our  conduct,  what  vital  difference 
can  it  possibly  make  to  a  man's  religion  whether  they  be 
true  or  false? 

For  my  own  part,  although  I  dislike  to  say  aught  that 
may  grate  upon  tender  associations,  I  must  frankly  confess 
that  even  though  these  attributes  were  faultlessly  deduced,  I 
cannot  conceive  of  its  being  of  the  smallest  consequence  to 
us  religiously  that  any  one  of  them  should  be  true.  Pray, 
what  specific  act  can  I  perform  in  order  to  adapt  myself  the 
better  to  God's  simplicity  ?  Or  how  does  it  assist  me  to  plan 
my  behavior,  to  know  that  his  happiness  is  anyhow  absolute- 
ly complete?  In  the  middle  of  the  century  just  past,  Mayne 
Reid  was  the  great  writer  of  books  of  out-of-door  adven- 
ture. He  was  forever  extolling  the  hunters  and  field-observ- 
ers of  living  animals'  habits,  and  keeping  up  a  fire  of  in- 
vective against  the  "closet-naturalists,"  as  he  called  them, 
the  collectors  and  classifiers,  and  handlers  of  skeletons  and 
skins.  When  I  was  a  boy,  I  used  to  think  that  a  closet-nat- 
uralist must  be  the  vilest  type  of  wretch  under  the  sun. 
But  surely  the  systematic  theologians  are  the  closet-natural- 
ists of  the  deity,  even  in  Captain  Mayne  Reid's  sense.  What 
is  their  deduction  of  metaphysical  attributes  but  a  shuffling 


PHILOSOPHY  437 

and  matching  of  pedantic  dictionary-adjectives,  aloof  from 
morals,  aloof  from  human  needs,  something  that  might  be 
worked  out  from  the  mere  word  "God"  by  one  of  those 
logical  machines  of  wood  and  brass  which  recent  ingenuity 
has  contrived  as  well  as  by  a  man  of  flesh  and  blood.  They 
have  the  trail  of  the  serpent  over  them.  One  feels  that  in 
the  theologians'  hands,  they  are  only  a  set  of  titles  obtained 
by  a  mechanical  manipulation  of  synonyms;  verbality  has 
stepped  into  the  place  of  vision,  professionalism  into  that  of 
life.  Instead  of  bread  we  have  a  stone;  instead  of  a  fish,  a 
serpent.  Did  such  a  conglomeration  of  abstract  terms  give 
really  the  gist  of  our  knowledge  of  the  deity,  schools  of 
theology  might  indeed  continue  to  flourish,  but  religion, 
vital  religion,  would  have  taken  its  flight  from  this  world. 
What  keeps  religion  going  is  something  else  than  abstract 
definitions  and  systems  of  concatenated  adjectives,  and 
something  different  from  faculties  of  theology  and  their 
professors.  All  these  things  are  after-effects,  secondary  accre- 
tions upon  those  phenomena  of  vital  conversation  with  the 
unseen  divine,  of  which  I  have  shown  you  so  many  in- 
stances, renewing  themselves  in  scecula  scsculorum  in  the 
lives  of  humble  private  men. 

So  much  for  the  metaphysical  attributes  of  God!  From 
the  point  of  view  of  practical  religion,  the  metaphysical 
monster  which  they  offer  to  our  worship  is  an  absolutely 
worthless  invention  of  the  scholarly  mind. 

What  shall  we  now  say  of  the  attributes  called  moral? 
Pragmatically,  they  stand  on  an  entirely  different  footing. 
They  positively  determine  fear  and  hope  and  expectation, 
and  are  foundations  for  the  saintly  life.  It  needs  but  a  glance 
at  them  to  show  how  great  is  their  significance. 

God's  holiness,  for  example:  being  holy,  God  can  will 
nothing  but  the  good.  Being  omnipotent,  he  can  secure  its 
triumph.  Being  omniscient,  he  can  see  us  in  the  dark.  Being 


438       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

just,  he  can  punish  us  for  what  he  sees.  Being  loving,  he 
can  pardon  too.  Being  unalterable,  we  can  count  on  him 
securely.  These  qualities  enter  into  connection  with  our  life, 
it  is  highly  important  that  we  should  be  informed  concern- 
ing them.  That  God's  purpose  in  creation  should  be  the 
manifestation  of  his  glory  is  also  an  attribute  which  has 
definite  relations  to  our  practical  life.  Among  other  things 
it  has  given  a  definite  character  to  worship  in  all  Christian 
countries.  If  dogmatic  theology  really  does  prove  beyond 
dispute  that  a  God  with  characters  like  these  exists,  she  may 
well  claim  to  give  a  solid  basis  to  religious  sentiment.  But 
verily,  how  stands  it  with  her  arguments? 

It  stands  with  them  as  ill  as  with  the  arguments  for  his 
existence.  Not  only  do  post-Kantian  idealists  reject  them 
root  and  branch,  but  it  is  a  plain  historic  fact  that  they  never 
have  converted  any  one  who  has  found  in  the  moral  com- 
plexion of  the  world,  as  he  experienced  it,  reasons  for  doubt- 
ing that  a  good  God  can  have  framed  it.  To  prove  God's 
goodness  by  the  scholastic  argument  that  there  is  no  non- 
being  in  his  essence  would  sound  to  such  a  witness  simply 
silly. 

No!  the  book  of  Job  went  over  this  whole  matter  once  for 
all  and  definitively.  Ratiocination  is  a  relatively  superficial 
and  unreal  path  to  the  deity:  "I  will  lay  mine  hand  upon  my 
mouth;  I  have  heard  of  Thee  by  the  hearing  of  the  ear,  but 
now  mine  eye  seeth  Thee."  An  intellect  perplexed  and  baf- 
fled, yet  a  trustful  sense  of  presence — such  is  the  situation 
of  the  man  who  is  sincere  with  himself  and  with  the  facts, 
but  who  remains  religious  still.-^ 

^  Pragmatically,  the  most  important  attribute  of  God  is  his  punitive 
justice.  But  who,  in  the  present  state  of  theological  opinion  on  that 
point,  will  dare  maintain  that  hell  fire  or  its  equivalent  in  some 
shape  is  rendered  certain  by  pure  logic?  Theology  herself  has  largely 
based  this  doctrine  upon  revelation;  and,  in  discussing  it,  has  tended 
more  and  more  to  substitute  conventional  ideas  of  criminal  law  for  a 
priori  principles  of  reason.  But  the  very  notion  that  this  glorious  uni- 


PHILOSOPHY  439 

We  must  therefore,  I  think,  bid  a  definitive  good-by  to 
dogmatic  theology.  In  all  sincerity  our  faith  must  do  with- 
out that  warrant.  Modern  idealism,  I  repeat,  has  said  good- 
by  to  this  theology  forever.  Can  modern  idealism  give  faith 
a  better  warrant,  or  must  she  still  rely  on  her  poor  self  for 
witness? 

The  basis  of  modern  idealism  is  Kant's  doctrine  of  the 
Transcendental  Ego  of  Apperception.  By  this  formidable 
term  Kant  merely  meant  the  fact  that  the  consciousness  "I 
think  them"  must  (potentially  or  actually)  accompany  all 
our  objects.  Former  skeptics  had  said  as  much,  but  the 
"I"  in  question  had  remained  for  them  identified  with  the 
personal  individual.  Kant  abstracted  and  depersonalized  it, 
and  made  it  the  most  universal  of  all  his  categories,  although 
for  Kant  himself  the  Transcendental  Ego  had  no  theolog- 
ical implications. 

It  was  reserved  for  his  successors  to  convert  Kant's  no- 
tion of  Betuusstsein  iiberhaupt,  or  abstract  consciousness, 
into  an  infinite  concrete  self-consciousness  which  is  the  soul 
of  the  world,  and  in  which  our  sundry  personal  self-con- 
sciousnesses have  their  being.  It  would  lead  me  into  techni- 
calities to  show  you  even  briefly  how  this  transformation 
was  in  point  of  fact  effected.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  in  the 
Hegelian  school,  which  to-day  so  deeply  influences  both 
British  and  American  thinking,  two  principles  have  borne 
the  brunt  of  the  operation. 

The  first  of  these  principles  is  that  the  old  logic  of  identity 
never  gives  us  more  than  a  post-mortem  dissection  of  dis- 
jecta membra,  and  that  the  fullness  of  life  can  be  construed 
to  thought  only  by  recognizing  that  every  object  which  our 

verse,  with  planets  and  winds,  and  laughing  sky  and  ocean,  should 
have  been  conceived  and  had  its  beams  and  rafters  laid  in  technicali- 
ties of  criminality,  is  incredible  to  our  modern  imagination.  It  weak- 
ens a  religion  to  hear  it  argued  upon  such  a  basis. 


440       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

thought  may  propose  to  itself  involves  the  notion  of  some 
other  object  which  seems  at  first  to  negate  the  first  one. 

The  second  principle  is  that  to  be  conscious  of  a  negation 
is  already  virtually  to  be  beyond  it.  The  mere  asking  of  a 
question  or  expression  of  a  dissatisfaction  proves  that  the 
answer  or  the  satisfaction  is  already  imminent;  the  finite, 
realized  as  such,  is  already  the  infinite  in  posse. 

Applying  these  principles,  we  seem  to  get  a  propulsive 
force  into  our  logic  which  the  ordinary  logic  of  a  bare, 
stark  self-identity  in  each  thing  never  attains  to.  The  objects 
of  our  thought  now  act  within  our  thought,  act  as  objects 
act  when  given  in  experience.  They  change  and  develop. 
They  introduce  something  other  than  themselves  along  with 
them;  and  this  other,  at  first  only  ideal  or  potential,  present- 
ly proves  itself  also  to  be  actual.  It  supersedes  the  thing  at 
first  supposed,  and  both  verifies  and  corrects  it,  in  develop- 
ing the  fullness  of  its  meaning. 

The  program  is  excellent;  the  universe  is  a  place  where 
things  are  followed  by  other  things  that  both  correct  and 
fulfill  them;  and  a  logic  which  gave  us  something  like  this 
movement  of  fact  would  express  truth  far  better  than  the 
traditional  school-logic,  which  never  gets  of  its  own  accord 
from  anything  to  anything  else,  and  registers  only  predic- 
tions and  subsumptions,  or  static  resemblances  and  differ- 
ences. Nothing  could  be  more  unlike  the  methods  of  dog- 
matic theology  than  those  of  this  new  logic.  Let  me  quote 
in  illustration  some  passages  from  the  Scottish  transccn- 
dcntalist  whom  I  have  already  named. 

"How  are  we  to  conceive,"  Principal  Caird  writes,  "of  the 
reality  in  which  all  intelligence  rests?"  He  replies:  "Two  things 
may  without  difficulty  be  proved,  viz.,  that  this  reality  is  an  ab- 
solute Spirit,  and  conversely  that  it  is  only  in  communion  with 
this  absolute  Spirit  or  Intelligence  that  the  finite  Spirit  can  real- 
ize itself.  It  is  absolute;  for  the  faintest  movement  of  human  in- 
telligence would  be  arrested,  if  it  did  not  presuppose  the  abso- 


PHILOSOPHY  441 

lute  reality  of  intelligence,  of  thought  itself.  Doubt  or  denial 
themselves  presuppose  and  indirectly  affirm  it.  When  I  pro- 
nounce anything  to  be  true,  I  pronounce  it,  indeed,  to  be  rela- 
tive to  thought,  but  not  to  be  relative  to  my  thought,  or  to  the 
thought  of  any  other  individual  mind.  From  the  existence  of  all 
individual  minds  as  such  I  can  abstract;  I  can  think  them  away. 
But  that  which  I  cannot  think  away  is  thought  or  self-conscious- 
ness itself,  in  its  independence  and  absoluteness,  or,  in  other 
words,  an  Absolute  Thought  or  Self-Consciousness." 

Here,  you  see,  Principal  Caird  makes  the  transition  which 
Kant  did  not  make:  he  converts  the  omnipresence  of  con- 
sciousness in  general  as  a  condition  of  "truth"  being  any- 
where possible,  into  an  omnipresent  universal  consciousness, 
which  he  identifies  with  God  in  his  concreteness.  He  next 
proceeds  to  use  the  principle  that  to  acknowledge  your  limits 
is  in  essence  to  be  beyond  them;  and  makes  the  transition  to 
the  religious  experience  of  individuals  in  the  following 
words : — 

"If  [Man]  were  only  a  creature  of  transient  sensations  and 
impulses,  of  an  ever  coming  and  going  succession  of  intuitions, 
fancies,  feelings,  then  nothing  could  ever  have  for  him  the  char- 
acter of  objective  truth  or  reality.  But  it  is  the  prerogative  of 
man's  spiritvial  nature'  that  he  can  yield  himself  up  to  a  thought 
and  will  that  are  infinitely  larger  than  his  own.  As  a  thinking, 
self-conscious  being,  indeed,  he  may  be  said,  by  his  very  nature, 
to  live  in  the  atmosphere  of  the  Universal  Life.  As  a  thinking 
being,  it  is  possible  for  me  to  suppress  and  quell  in  my  con- 
sciousness every  movement  of  self-assertion,  every  notion  and 
opinion  that  is  merely  mine,  every  desire  that  belongs  to  me  as 
this  particular  Self,  and  to  become  the  pure  medium  of  a 
thought  that  is  universal — in  one  word,  to  live  no  more  my  own 
life,  but  let  my  consciousness  be  possessed  and  suffused  by  the 
Infinite  and  Eternal  life  of  spirit.  And  yet  it  is  just  in  this  re- 
nunciation of  self  that  I  truly  gain  myself,  or  realize  the  highest 
possibilities  of  my  own  nature.  For  whilst  in  one  sense  we  give 
up  self  to  live  the  universal  and  absolute  life  of  reason,  yet  that 


442       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

to  which  we  thus  surrender  ourselves  is  in  reaUty  our  truer  self. 
The  life  of  absolute  reason  is  not  a  life  that  is  foreign  to  us." 

Nevertheless,  Principal  Caird  goes  on  to  say,  so  far  as  we 
are  able  outwardly  to  realize  this  doctrine,  the  balm  it  offers 
remains  incomplete.  Whatever  we  may  be  in  posse,  the  very 
best  of  us  in  acta  falls  very  short  of  being  absolutely  divine. 
Social  morality,  love,  and  self-sacrifice  even,  merge  our  Self 
only  in  some  other  finite  self  or  selves.  They  do  not  quite 
identify  it  with  the  Infinite.  Man's  ideal  destiny,  infinite  in 
abstract  logic,  might  thus  seem  in  practice  forever  unrealiz- 
able. 

"Is  there,  then,"  our  author  continues,  "no  solution  of  the 
contradiction  between  the  ideal  and  the  actual?  We  answer, 
There  is  such  a  solution,  but  in  order  to  reach  it  we  are  carried 
beyond  the  sphere  of  morality  into  that  of  religion.  It  may  be 
said  to  be  the  essential  characteristic  of  religion  as  contrasted 
with  morality,  that  it  changes  aspiration  into  fruition,  anticipa- 
tion into  realization;  that  instead  of  leaving  man  in  the  inter- 
minable pursuit  of  a  vanishing  ideal,  it  makes  him  the  actual 
partaker  of  a  divine  or  infinite  life.  Whether  we  view  religion 
from  the  human  side  or  the  divine — as  the  surrender  of  the  soul 
to  God,  or  as  the  life  of  God  in  the  soul — in  either  aspect  it  is 
of  its  very  essence  that  the  Infinite  has  ceased  to  be  a  far-off 
vision,  and  has  become  a  present  reality.  The  very  first  pulsa- 
tion of  the  spiritual  life,  when  we  rightly  apprehend  its  signifi- 
cance, is  the  indication  that  the  division  between  the  Spirit  and 
its  object  has  vanished,  that  the  ideal  has  become  real,  that  the 
finite  has  reached  its  goal  and  become  suflused  with  the  pres- 
ence and  life  of  the  Infinite. 

"Oneness  of  mind  and  will  with  the  divine  mind  and  will  is 
not  the  future  hope  and  aim  of  religion,  but  its  very  beginning 
and  birth  in  the  soul.  To  enter  on  the  religious  life  is  to  termi- 
nate the  struggle.  In  that  act  which  constitutes  the  beginning 
of  the  religious  life — call  it  faith,  or  trust,  or  self-surrender,  or 
by  whatever  name  you  will — there  is  involved  the  identification 
of  the  finite  with  a  life  which  is  eternally  realized.  It  is  true  in- 


PHILOSOPHY  443 

deed  that  the  rehgious  hfe  is  progressive;  but  understood  in  the 
Hght  of  the  foregoing  idea,  rehgious  progress  is  not  progress 
towards,  but  within  the  sphere  of  the  Infinite.  It  is  not  the  vain 
attempt  by  endless  finite  additions  or  increments  to  become 
possessed  of  infinite  wealth,  but  it  is  the  endeavor,  by  the  con- 
stant exercise  of  spiritual  activity,  to  appropriate  that  infinite 
inheritance  of  which  we  are  already  in  possession.  The  whole 
future  of  the  religious  life  is  given  in  its  beginning,  but  it  is 
given  implicitly.  The  position  of  the  man  who  has  entered  on 
the  religious  life  is  that  evil,  error,  imperfection,  do  not  really 
belong  to  him:  they  are  excrescences  which  have  no  organic  re- 
lation to  his  true  nature:  they  are  already  virtually,  as  they  will 
be  actually,  suppressed  and  annulled,  and  in  the  very  process 
of  being  annulled  they  become  the  means  of  spiritual  progress. 
Though  he  is  not  exempt  from  temptation  and  conflict,  [yet] 
in  that  inner  sphere  in  which  his  true  life  lies,  the  struggle  is 
over,  the  victory  already  achieved.  It  is  not  a  finite  but  an  infi- 
nite life  which  the  spirit  lives.  Every  pulse -beat  of  its  [existence] 
is  the  expression  and  realization  of  the  life  of  God."  ^ 

You  will  readily  admit  that  no  description  of  the  phenom- 
ena of  the  religious  consciousness  could  be  better  than 
these  words  of  your  lamented  preacher  and  philosopher. 
They  reproduce  the  very  rapture  of  those  crises  of  conver- 
sion of  which  we  have  been  hearing;  they  utter  what  the 
mystic  felt  but  was  unable  to  communicate;  and  the  saint, 
in  hearing  them,  recognizes  his  own  experience.  It  is  indeed 
gratifying  to  find  the  content  of  religion  reported  so  unani- 
mously. But  when  all  is  said  and  done,  has  Principal  Caird 
— and  I  only  use  him  as  an  example  of  that  whole  mode  of 
thinking — transcended  the  sphere  of  feeling  and  of  the  di- 
rect experience  of  the  individual,  and  laid  the  foundations 
of  religion  in  impartial  reason  .^^  Has  he  made  religion  uni- 
versal by  coercive  reasoning,  transformed  it  from  a  private 

^  John  Caird:  An  Introduction  to  the  Philosophy  of  Religion,  Lon- 
don and  New  York,  1880,  pp.  243-250,  and  291-299,  much  abridged. 


444       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

faith  into  a  public  certainty?  Has  he  rescued  its  affirmations 
from  obscurity  and  mystery? 

I  beheve  that  he  has  done  nothing  of  the  kind,  but  that 
he  has  simply  reaffirmed  the  individual's  experiences  in  a 
more  generalized  vocabulary.  And  again,  I  can  be  excused 
from  proving  technically  that  the  transcendentalist  reason- 
ings fail  to  make  religion  universal,  for  I  can  point  to  the 
plain  fact  that  a  majority  of  scholars,  even  rehgiously  dis- 
posed ones,  stubbornly  refuse  to  treat  them  as  convincing. 
The  whole  of  Germany,  one  may  say,  has  positively  rejected 
the  Hegelian  argumentation.  As  for  Scotland,  I  need  only 
mention  Professor  Eraser's  and  Professor  Pringle-Pattison's 
memorable  criticisms,  with  which  so  many  of  you  are  fa- 
miliar.^ Once  more,  I  ask,  if  transcendental  idealism  were 

1  A.  C.  Fraser:  Philosophy  of  Theism,  second  edition,  Edinburgh 
and  London,  1899,  especially  part  ii,  chaps,  vii  and  viii.;  A.  Seth 
[Pringle-Pattison]  :    Hegelianism    and    Personality,    Ibid.,     1890, 

passim. 

The  most  persuasive  arguments  in  favor  of  a  concrete  individual 
Soul  of  the  world,  with  which  I  am  acquainted,  are  those  of  my  col- 
league, Josiah  Royce,  in  his  Religious  Aspect  of  Philosophy,  Boston, 
1885;  in  his  Conception  of  God,  New  York  and  London,  1897;  and 
lately  in  his  Aberdeen  Gifford  Lectures,  The  World  and  the  Indi- 
vidual, 2  vols..  New  York  and  London,  1901-02.  I  doubdess  seem  to 
some  of  my  readers  to  evade  the  philosophic  duty  which  my  thesis  in 
this  lecture  imposes  on  me,  by  not  even  attempting  to  meet  Profes- 
sor Royce's  arguments  ardculately.  I  admit  the  momentary  evasion. 
In  the  present  lectures,  which  are  cast  throughout  in  a  popular 
mould,  there  seemed  no  room  for  subde  metaphysical  discussion,  and 
for  tactical  purposes  it  was  sufficient,  the  contention  of  philosophy 
being  what  it  is  (namely,  that  religion  can  be  transformed  into  a 
universally  convincing  science),  to  point  to  the  fact  that  no  religious 
philosophy  has  actually  convinced  the  mass  of  thinkers.  Meanwhile 
let  me  say  that  I  hope  that  the  present  volume  may  be  followed  by 
another,  if  I  am  spared  to  write  it,  in  which  not  only  Professor  Royce's 
arguments,  but  others  for  monistic  absolutism  shall  be  considered 
with  all  the  technical  fullness  which  their  great  importance  calls  for. 
At  present  I  resign  mysdf  to  lying  passive  under  the  reproach  of 
superficiality. 


PHILOSOPHY  445 

as  objectively  and  absolutely  rational  as  it  pretends  to  be, 
could  it  possibly  fail  so  egregiously  to  be  persuasive? 

What  religion  reports,  you  must  remember,  alw^ays  pur- 
ports to  be  a  fact  of  experience:  the  divine  is  actually  pres- 
ent, religion  says,  and  between  it  and  ourselves  relations  of 
give  and  take  are  actual.  If  definite  perceptions  of  fact  like 
this  cannot  stand  upon  their  own  feet,  surely  abstract  reas- 
oning cannot  give  them  the  support  they  are  in  need  of. 
Conceptual  processes  can  class  facts,  define  them,  interpret 
them;  but  they  do  not  produce  them,  nor  can  they  repro- 
duce their  individuality.  There  is  always  a  plus,  a  thisness, 
which  feeling  alone  can  answer  for.  Philosophy  in  this 
sphere  is  thus  a  secondary  function,  unable  to  warrant  faith's 
veracity,  and  so  I  revert  to  the  thesis  which  I  announced  ai 
the  beginning  of  this  lecture. 

In  all  sad  sincerity  I  think  we  must  conclude  that  the 
attempt  to  demonstrate  by  purely  intellectual  processes  the 
truth  of  the  deliverances  of  direct  religious  experience  is 
absolutely  hopeless. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  philosophy,  however,  to  leave  her 
under  this  negative  sentence.  Let  me  close,  then,  by  briefly 
enumerating  what  she  can  do  for  religion.  If  she  will  aban- 
don metaphysics  and  deduction  for  criticism  and  induction, 
and  frankly  transform  herself  from  theology  into  science  of 
religions,  she  can  make  herself  enormously  useful. 

The  spontaneous  intellect  of  man  always  defines  the 
divine  which  it  feels  in  ways  that  harmonize  with  its  tem- 
porary intellectual  prepossessions.  Philosophy  can  by  com- 
parison eliminate  the  local  and  the  accidental  from  these 
definitions.  Both  from  dogma  and  from  worship  she  can  re- 
move historic  incrustations.  By  confronting  the  spontaneous 
religious  constructions  with  the  results  of  natural  science, 
philosophy  can  also  eliminate  doctrines  that  are  now  known 
to  be  scientifically  absurd  or  incongruous. 


446       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

Sifting  out  in  this  way  unworthy  formulations,  she  can 
leave  a  residuum  of  conceptions  that  at  least  are  possible. 
With  these  she  can  deal  as  hypotheses,  testing  them  in  all 
the  manners,  whether  negative  or  positive,  by  which  hypo- 
theses are  ever  tested.  She  can  reduce  their  number,  as  some 
are  found  more  open  to  objection.  She  can  perhaps  become 
the  champion  of  one  which  she  picks  out  as  being  the  most 
closely  verified  or  verifiable.  She  can  refine  upon  the  defini- 
tion of  this  hypothesis,  distinguishing  between  what  is  in- 
nocent over-belief  and  symbolism  in  the  expression  of  it, 
and  what  is  to  be  literally  taken.  As  a  result,  she  can  oflfer 
mediation  between  different  believers,  and  help  to  bring 
about  consensus  of  opinion.  She  can  do  this  the  more  suc- 
cessfully, the  better  she  discriminates  the  common  and  es- 
sential from  the  individual  and  local  elements  of  the  reli- 
gious beliefs  which  she  com4iares. 

I  do  not  see  why  a  critical  Science  of  Religions  of  this  sort 
might  not  eventually  command  as  general  a  public  adhe- 
sion as  is  commanded  by  a  physical  science.  Even  the  per- 
sonally non-religious  might  accept  its  conclusions  on  trust, 
much  as  blind  persons  now  accept  the  facts  of  optics — it 
might  appear  as  foolish  to  refuse  them.  Yet  as  the  science  of 
optics  has  to  be  fed  in  the  first  instance,  and  continually  ver- 
ified later,  by  facts  experienced  by  seeing  persons;  so  the 
science  of  religions  would  depend  for  it's  original  material 
on  facts  of  personal  experience,  and  would  have  to  square 
itself  with  personal  experience  through  all  its  critical  re- 
constructions. It  could  never  get  away  from  concrete  life,  or 
work  in  a  conceptual  vacuum.  It  would  forever  have  to  con- 
fess, as  every  science  confesses,  that  the  subtlety  of  nature 
flies  beyond  it,  and  that  its  formulas  are  but  approxima- 
tions. Philosophy  lives  in  words,  but  truth  and  fact  well  up 
into  our  lives  in  ways  that  exceed  verbal  formulation.  There 
is  in  the  living  act  of  perception  always  something  that 
glimmers  and  twinkles  and  will  not  be  caught,  and  for 


PHILOSOPHY  447 

which  reflection  comes  too  late.  No  one  knows  this  as  well 
as  the  philosopher.  He  must  fire  his  volley  of  new  vocables 
out  of  his  conceptual  shotgun,  for  his  profession  condemns 
him  to  this  industry,  but  he  secretly  knows  the  hollowness 
and  irrelevancy.  His  formulas  are  like,  stereoscopic  or  kineto- 
scopic  photographs  seen  outside  the  instrument;  they  lack 
the  depth,  the  motion,  the  vitality.  In  the  religious  sphere, 
in  particular,  belief  that  formulas  are  true  can  never  wholly 
take  the  place  of  personal  experience. 

In  my  next  lecture  I  will  try  to  complete  my  rough  de- 
scription of  religious  experience;  and  in  the  lecture  after 
that,  which  is  the  last  one,  I  will  try  my  hand  at  formulat- 
ing conceptually  the  truth  to  which  it  is  a  witness. 


Lecture  XIX 
OTHER    CHARACTERISTICS 

WE  have  wound  our  way  back,  after  our  excursion 
through  mysticism  and  philosophy,  to  where  we 
were  before:  the  uses  of  religion,  its  uses  to  the  individual 
who  has  it,  and  the  uses  of  the  individual  himself  to  the 
world,  are  the  best  arguments  that  truth  is  in  it.  We  return 
to  the  empirical  philosophy:  the  true  is  what  works  well, 
even  though  the  qualification  "on  the  whole"  may  always 
have  to  be  added.  In  this  lecture  we  must  revert  to  descrip- 
tion again,  and  finish  our  picture  of  the  religious  conscious- 
ness by  a  word  about  some  of  its  other  characteristic  elements. 
Then,  in  a  final  lecture,  we  shall  be  free  to  make  a  general 
review  and  draw  our  independent  conclusions. 

The  first  point  I  will  speak  of  is  the  part  which  the  aesthet- 
ic life  plays  in  determining  one's  choice  of  a  religion.  Men, 
[  said  awhile  ago,  involuntarily  intellectualize  their  religious 
experience.  They  need  formulas,  just  as  they  need  fellow- 
ship in  worship.  I  spoke,  therefore,  too  contemptuously  of 
the  pragmatic  uselessness  of  the  famous  scholastic  list  of 
attributes  of  the  deity,  for  they  have  one  use  which  I  neglect- 
ed to  consider.  The  eloquent  passage  in.  which  Newman 
enumerates  them  ^  puts  us  on  the  track  of  it.  Intoning  them 
as  he  would  intone  a  cathedral  service,  he  shows  how  high 
is  their  aesthetic  value.  It  enriches  our  bare  piety  to  carry 
these  exalted  and  mysterious  verbal  additions  just  as  it  en- 
riches a  church  to  have  an  organ  and  old  brasses,  marbles 
and  frescoes  and  stained  windows.  Epithets  lend  an  atmos- 

1  Idea  of  a  University,  Discourse  III.  $  7. 

44« 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  449 

phere  and  overtones  to  our  devotion.  They  are  like  a  hymn 
of  praise  and  service  of  glory,  and  may  sound  the  more  sub- 
lime for  being  incomprehensible.  Minds  like  Newman's^ 
grow  as  jealous  of  their  credit  as  heathen  priests  are  of  that 
of  the  jewelry  and  ornaments  that  blaze  upon  their  idols, 
Among  the  buildingsnaut  of  religion  which  the  mind 
spontaneously  indulges  in,  the  aesthetic  motive  must  never 
be  forgotten.  I  promised  to  say  nothing  of  ecclesiastical  sys- 
tems in  these  lectures.  I  may  be  allowed,  however,  to  put  in 
a  word  at  this  point  on  the  way  in  which  their  satisfaction 
of  certain  ssthetic  needs  contributes  to  their  hold  on  human 
nature.  Although  some  persons  aim  most  at  intellectual 
purity  and  simplification,  for  others  richness  is  the  supreme 
imaginative  requirement.^  When  one's  mind  is  strongly  of 
this  type,  an  individual  religion  will  hardly  serve  the  pur- 
pose. The  inner  need  is  rather  of  something  institutional 
and  complex,  majestic  in  the  hierarchic  interrelatedness  of 

^  Newman's  imagination  so  innately  craved  an  ecclesiastical  sys- 
tem that  he  can  write:  "From  the  age  of  fifteen,  dogma  has  been  the 
fundamental  principle  of  my  religion:  I  know  no  other  religion;  I 
cannot  enter  into  the  idea  of  any  other  sort  of  religion."  And  again, 
speaking  of  himself  about  the  age  of  thirty,  he  writes:  "I  loved  to  act 
as  feeling  myself  in  my  Bishop's  sight,  as  if  it  were  the  sight  of  God." 
Apologia,  1897,  pp.  48,  50. 

2  The  intellectual  difference  is  quite  on  a  par  in  pracdcal  import- 
ance with  the  analogous  difference  in  character.  We  saw,  under  the 
head  of  Saindiness,  how  some  characters  resent  confusion  and  must 
live  in  purity,  consistency,  simplicity  (above,  p.  275  ff.).  For  others,  on 
the  contrary,  superabundance,  over-pressure,  stimulation,  lots  of  su- 
perficial relations,  are  indispensable.  There  are  men  who  would  suf- 
fer a  very  syncope  if  you  should  pay  all  their  debts,  bring  it  about 
that  their  engagements  had  been  kept,  their  letters  answered,  their 
perplexities  relieved,  and  their  duties  fulfilled,  down  to  one  which  lay 
on  a  clean  table  under  their  eyes  with  nothing  to  interfere  with  its 
immediate  performance.  A  day  stripped  so  staringly  bare  would  be 
for  them  appalling.  So  with  ease,  elegance,  tributes  of  affection,  so- 
cial recognitions — some  of  us  require  amounts  of  these  things  which 
to  others  would  appear  a  mass  of  lying  and  sophistication. 


450       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

its  parts,  with  authority  descending  from  stage  to  stage,  and 
at  every  stage  objects  for  adjectives  of  mystery  and  splendor, 
derived  in  the  last  resort  from  the  Godhead  who  is  the 
fountain  and  culmination  of  the  system.  One  feels  then  as  if 
in  presence  of  some  vast  incrusted  work  of  jewelry  or  archi- 
tecture; one  hears  the  multitudinous  liturgical  appeal;  one 
gets  the  honorific  vibration  coining  from  every  quarter. 
Compared  with  such  a  noble  complexity,  in  which  ascend- 
ing and  descending  movements  seem  in  no  way  to  jar  upon 
stability,  in  which  no  single  item,  however  humble,  is  in- 
significant, because  so  many  august  institutions  hold  it  in 
its  place,  how  flat  does  evangelical  Protestantism  appear, 
how  bare  the  atmosphere  of  those  isolated  religious  lives 
whose  boast  it  is  that  "man  in  the  bush  with  God  may 
meet."  ^  What  a  pulverization  and  leveHng  of  what  a  glor- 
iously piled-up  structure!  To  an  imagination  used  to  the 
perspectives  of  dignity  and  glory,  the  naked  gospel  scheme 
seems  to  offer  an  almshouse  for  a  palace. 

It  is  much  like  the  patriotic  sentiment  of  those  brought 
up  in  ancient  empires.  How  many  emotions  must  be  frus- 
trated of  their  object,  when  one  gives  up  the  titles  of  dig- 
nity, the  crimson  lights  and  blare  of  brass,  the  gold  em- 
broidery, the  plumed  troops,  the  fear  and  trembling,  and 
puts  up  with  a  president  in  a  black  coat  who  shakes  hands 
with  you,  and  comes,  it  may  be,  from  a  "home"  upon  a 
veldt  or  prairie  with  one  sitting-room  and  a  Bible  on  its 
centre-table.  It  pauperizes  the  monarchical  imagination! 

The  strength  of  these  azsthetic  sentiments  makes  it  rig- 
orously impossible,  it  seems  to  me,  that  Protestantism,  how- 
ever superior  in  spiritual  profundity  it  may  be  to  Catholi- 
cism, should  at  the  present  day  succeed  in  making  many 
converts  from  the  more  venerable  ecclesiasticism.  The  latter 

^  In  Newman's  Lectures  on  Justification,  Lecture  VIII.  §  6,  there  is 
ii  splendid  passage  expressive  of  this  aesthetic  way  of  feeling  the  Chris- 
dan  scheme.  It  is  unfortunately  too  long  to  quote. 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  45I 

offers  a  so  much  richer  pasturage  and  shade  to  the  fapcy, 
has  so  many  cells  with  so  many  different  kinds  of  honey,  is 
so  indulgent  in  its  multiform  appeals  to  human  nature,  that 
Protestantism  will  always  show  to  Catholic  eyes  the  alms- 
house physiognomy.  The  bitter  negativity  of  it  is  to  the 
CathoUc  mind  incomprehensible.  To  intellectual  Catholics 
many  of  the  antiquated  beliefs  and  practices  to  which  the  " 
Church  gives  countenance  are,  if  taken  literally,  as  childish 
as  they  are  to  Protestants.  But  they  are  childish  in  the  pleas- 
ing sense  of  "childlike"— innocent  and  amiable,  and  worthy 
to  be  smiled  on  in  consideration  of  the  undeveloped  condi- 
tion of  the  dear  people's  intellects.  To  the  Protestant,  on  the 
contrary,  they  are  childish  in  the  sense  of  being  idiotic  false- 
hoods. He  must  stamp  out  their  delicate  and  lovable  redun- 
dancy, leaving  the  Catholic  to  shudder  at  his  literalness.  He 
appears  to  the  latter  as  morose  as  if  he  were  some  hard-eyed, 
numb,  monotonous  kind  of  reptile.  The  two  will  never  un- 
derstand each  other — their  centres  of  emotional  energy  are. 
too  different.  Rigorous  truth  and  human  nature's  intricacies 
are  always  in  need  of  a  mutual  interpreter.^  So  much  for 
the  aesthetic  diversities  in  the  religious  consciousness. 

In  most  books  on  religion,  three  things  are  represented  as 
its  most  essential  elements.  These  are  Sacrifice,  Confession, 
and  Prayer.  I  must  say  a  word  in  turn  of  each  of  these  ele- 
ments, though  briefly.  First  of  Sacrifice. 

^  Compare  the  informality  of  Protestantism,  where  the  "meek  lover 
of  the  good,"  alone  with  his  God,  visits  the  sick,  etc.,  for  their  own 
sakes,  with  the  elaborate  "business"  that  goes  on  in  CathoUc  devo- 
tion, and  carries  with  it  the  social  excitement  of  all  more  complex 
businesses.  An  essentially  worldly-minded  Catholic  woman  can  be- 
come a  visitor  of  the  sick  on  purely  coquettish  principles,  with  her 
confessor  and  director,  her  "merit"  storing  up,  her  patron  saints,  her 
privileged  relation  to  the  Almighty,  drawing  his  attention  as  a  pro- 
fessional devote,  her  definite  "exercises,"  and  her  definitely  recog- 
nized social  pose  in  the  organization. 


452       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

Sacrifices  to  gods  are  omnipresent  in  primeval  worship; 
but,  as  cults  have  grown  refined,  burnt  oflferings  and  the 
blood  of  he-goats  have  been  superseded  by  sacrifices  more 
spiritual  in  their  nature.  Judaism,  Islam,  and  Buddhism  gel 
along  without  ritual  sacrifice;, so  does  Christianity,  save  in 
so  far  as  the  notion  is  preserved  in  transfigured  form  in  the 
mystery  of  Christ's  atonement.  These  religions  substitute 
offerings  of  the  heart,  renunciations  of  the  inner  self,  for 
all  those  vain  oblations.  In  the  ascetic  practices  which  Is- 
lam, Buddhism,  and  the  older  Christianity  encourage  wc 
see  how  indestructible  is  the  idea  that  sacrifice  of  some  sort 
is  a  religious  exercise.  In  lecturing  on  asceticism  I  spoke  of 
its  significance  as  symbolic  of  the  sacrifices  which  life,  when- 
ever it  is  taken  strenuously,  calls  for.^  But,  as  I  said  my  say 
about  those,  and  as  these  lectures  expressly  avoid  earlier  reli- 
gious usages  and  questions  of  derivation,  I  will  pass  from 
the  subject  of  Sacrifice  altogether  and  turn  to  that  of  Con- 
fession. 

In  regard  to  Confession  I  will  also  be  most  brief,  saying 
my  word  about  it  psychologically,  not  historically.  Not 
nearly  as  widespread  as  sacrifice,  it  corresponds  to  a  more 
inward  and  moral  stage  of  sentiment.  It  is  part  of  the  gen- 
eral system  of  purgation  and  cleansing  which  one  feels  one's 
self  in  need  of,  in  order  to  be  in  right  relations  to  one's 
deity.  For  him  who  confesses,  shams  are  over  and  realities 
have  begun;  he  has  exteriorized  his  rottenness.  If  he  has 
not  actually  got  rid  of  it,  he  at  least  no  longer  smears  it  over 
with  a  hypocritical  show  of  virtue— he  lives  at  least  upon  a 
basis  of  veracity.  The  complete  decay  of  the  practice  of  con- 
cession in  Anglo-Saxon  communities  is  a  little  hard  to  ac- 
count for.  Reaction  against  popery  is  of  course  the  historic 
explanation,  for  in  popery  confession  went  with  penances 
and  absolution,  and  other  inadmissible  practices.  But  on  the 

^  Above,  p.  354  ff. 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  453 

side  of  the  sinner  himself  it  seems  as  if  the  need  ought  to 
have  been  too  great  to  accept  so  summary  a  refusal  of  its 
satisfaction.  One  would  think  that  in  more  men  the  shell  of 
secrecy  would  have  had  to  open,  the  pent-in  abscess  to  burst 
and  gain  relief,  even  though  the  ear  that  heard  the  confes- 
sion were  unworthy.  The  Catholic  church,  for  obvious  utili- 
tarian reasons,  has  substituted  auricular  confession  to  one 
priest  for  the  more  radical  act  of  public  confession.  We 
Enghsh-speaking  Protestants,  in  the  general  self-reliance 
and  unsociability  of  our  nature,  seem  to  find  it  enough  if 
we  take  God  alone  into  our  confidence.-^ 

The  next  topic  on  which  I  must  comment  is  Prayer — and 
this  time  it  must  be  less  briefly.  We  have  heard  much  talk 
of  late  against  prayer,  especially  against  prayers  for  better 
weather  and  for  the  recovery  of  sick  people.  As  regards 
prayers  for  the  sick,  if  any  medical  fact  can  be  considered 
to  stand  firm,  it  is  that  in  certain  environments  prayer  may 
contribute  to  recovery,  and  should  be  encouraged  as  a 
therapeutic  measure.  Being  a  normal  factor  of  moral  health 
in  the  person,  its  omission  would  be  deleterious.  The  case  of 
the  weather  is  different.  Notwithstanding  the  recency  of  the 
opposite  belief,"  every  one  now  knows  that  droughts  and 
storms  follow  from  physical  antecedents,  and  that  moral  ap- 
peals cannot  avert  them.  But  petitional  prayer  is  only  one 
department  of  prayer;  and  if  we  take  the  word  in  the  wider 

^  A  fuller  discussion  of  confession  is  contained  in  the  excellent 
work  by  Frank  Granger:  The  Soul  of  a  Chrisdan,  London,  1900, 
ch.  xii. 

2  Example:  "The  minister  at  Sudbury,  being  at  the  Thursday  lec- 
ture in  Boston,  heard  the  officiadng  clergyman  praying  for  rain.  A* 
soon  as  the  service  was  over,  he  went  to  the  petitioner  and  said, 
'You  Boston  ministers,  as  soon  as  a  mlip  wilts  under  your  windows, 
go  to  church  and  pray  for  rain,  until  all  Concord  and  Sudbury  arc 
under  water.'  "  R.  W.  Emerson:  Lectures  and  Biographical  Sketches, 
p.  363. 


454       THE   VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

sense  as  meaning  every  kind  of  inward  communion  or  con- 
versation with  the  power  recognized  as  divine,  we  can  easily 
see  that  scientific  criticism  leaves  it  untouched. 

Prayer  in  this  wide  sense  is  the  very  soul  and  essence  of 
religion.  "Religion,"  says  a  liberal  French  theologian,  "is  an 
intercourse,  a  conscious  and  voluntary  relation,  entered  into 
by  a  soul  in  distress  with  the  mysterious  power  upon  which 
it  feels  itself  to  depend,  and  upon  which  its  fate  is  contin- 
gent.  This   intercourse   with   God   is    realized   by   prayer. 
Prayer  is  religion  in  act;  that  is,  prayer  is  real  religion.  It  is 
prayer  that  distinguishes  the  religious  phenomenon  from 
such  similar  or  neighboring  phenomena  as  purely  moral  or 
esthetic  sentiment.  Religion  is  nothing  if  it  be  not  the  vital 
act  by  which  the  entire  mind  seeks  to  save  itself  by  clinging 
to  the  principle  from  which  it  draws  its  life.  This  act  is 
prayer,  by  which  term  I  understand  no  vain  exercise  of 
words,  no  mere  repetition  of  certain  sacred  formulae,  but 
the  very  movement  itself  of  the  soul,  putting  itself  in  a  per- 
sonal  relation   of  contact   with   the   mysterious   power   of 
which  it  feels  the  presence — it  may  be  even  before  it  has  a 
name  by  which  to  call  it.  Wherever  this  interior  prayer  is 
lacking,  there  is  no  religion;  wherever,  on  the  other  hand, 
this  prayer  rises  and  stirs  the  soul,  even  in  the  absence  of 
forms  or  of  doctrines,  we  have  living  religion.  One  sees  from 
this  why  "natural  religion,  so-called,  is  not  properly  a  reli- 
gion. It  cuts  man  off  from  prayer.  It  leaves  him  and  God  in 
mutual  remoteness,  with  no  intimate  commerce,  no  interior 
dialogue,  no  interchange,  no  action  of  God  in  man,  no  re- 
turn of  man  to  God.  At  bottom  this  pretended  religion  is 
only  a  philosophy.  Born  at  epochs  of  rationalism,  of  critical 
investigations,  it  never  was  anything  but  an  abstraction. 
An  artificial  and  dead  creation,  it  reveals  to  its  examiner 
hardly  one  of  the  characters  proper  to  religion."  ^ 

^  AuGUSTE  Sabatier:  Esquisse  d'une  Philosophic  de  la  Religion, 
2me  ed.,  1897,  pp.  24-26,  abridged. 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  455 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  entire  series  of  our  lectures  proves 
the  truth  of  M.  Sabatier's  contention.  The  rehgious  phenom- 
enon,  studied  as  in  inner  fact,  and  apart  from  ecclesiastical 
or  theological  complications,  has  shown  itself  to  consist 
everywhere,  and  at  all  its  stages,  in  the  consciousness  which 
individuals  have  of  an  intercourse  between  themselves  and 
higher  powers  with  which  they  feel  themselves  to  be  related. 
This  intercourse  is  realized  at  the  time  as  being  both  active 
and  mutual.  If  it  be  not  effective;  if  it  be  not  a  give  and  take 
relation;  if  nothing  be  really  transacted  while  it  lasts;  if  the 
world  is  in  no  whit  different  for  its  having  taken  place; 
then  prayer,  taken  in  this  wide  meaning  of  a  sense  that 
something  is  transacting,  is  of  course  a  feeling  of  what  is 
illusory,  and  religion  must  on  the  whole  be  classed,  not 
simply  as  containing  elements  of  delusion — these  undoubt- 
edly everywhere  exist — but  as  being  rooted  in  delusion  alto- 
gether, just  as  materialists  and  atheists  have  always  said  it 
was.  At  most  there  might  remain,  when  the  direct  exper- 
iences of  prayer  were  ruled  out  as  false  witnesses,  some  in- 
ferential belief  that  the  whole  order  of  existence  must  have 
a  divine  cause.  But  this  way  of  contemplating  nature,  pleas- 
ing as  it  would  doubtless  be  to  persons  of  a  pious  taste, 
would  leave  to  them  but  the  spectators'  part  at  a  play, 
whereas  in  experimental  religion  and  the  prayerful  life,  we 
seem  ourselves  to  be  actors,  and  not  in  a  play,  but  in  a  very 
serious  reality. 

The  genuineness  of  religion  is  thus  indissolubly  bound  up 
with  the  question  whether  the  prayerful  consciousness  be  or 
be  not  deceitful.  The  conviction  that  something  is  genuinely 
transacted  in  this  consciousness  is  the  very  core  of  living 
religion.  As  to  what  is  transacted,  great  differences  of  opin- 
ion have  prevailed.  The  unseen  powers  have  been  supposed, 
and  are  yet  supposed,  to  do  things  which  no  enlightened 
man  can  nowadays  believe  in.  It  may  well  prove  that  the 
sphere  of  influence  in  prayer  is  subjective  exclusively,  and 


\^6      THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

that  what  is  immediately  changed  is  only  the  mind  of  the 
praying  person.  But  however  our  opinion  of  prayer's  effects 
may  come  to  be  limited  by  criticism,  religion,  in  the  vital 
sense  in  which  these  lectures  study  it,  must  stand  or  fall  by 
the  persuasion  that  effects  of  some  sort  genuinely  do  occur. 
Through  prayer,  religion  insists,  things  which  cannot  be 
realized  in  any  other  manner  come  about :  energy  which  but 
for  prayer  would  be  bound  is  by  prayer  set  free  and  oper- 
ates in  some  part,  be  it  objective  or  subjective,  of  the  world 
of  facts. 

This  postulate  is  strikingly  expressed  in  a  letter  written  by 
the  late  Frederic  W.  H.  Myers  to  a  friend,  who  allows  me  to 
quote  from  it.  It  shows  how  independent  the  prayer-instinct 
is  of  usual  doctrinal  complications.  Mr.  Myers  writes: — 

"I  am  glad  that  you  have  asked  me  about  prayer,  because  I 
have  rather  strong  ideas  on  the  subject.  First  consider  what  arc 
the  facts.  There  exists  around  us  a  spiritual  universe,  and  that 
universe  is  in  actual  relation  with  the  material.  From  the  spirit- 
ual universe  comes  the  energy  which  maintains  the  material; 
the  energy  which  makes  the  life  of  each  individual  spirit.  Our 
spirits  are  supported  by  a  perpetual  indrawal  of  this  energy,  and 
the  vigor  of  that  indrawal  is  perpetually  changing,  much  as  the 
vigor  of  our  absorption  of  material  nutriment  changes  from 
hour  to  hour. 

"I  call  these  'facts'  because  I  think  that  some  scheme  of  this 
kind  is  the  only  one  consistent  with  our  actual  evidence;  too 
complex  to  summarize  here.  How,  then,  should  we  act  on  these 
facts?  Plainly  we  must  endeavor  to  draw  in  as  much  spiritual 
life  as  possible,  and  we  must  place  our  minds  in  any  attitude 
which  experience  shows  to  be  favorable  to  such  indrawal. 
Prayer  is  the  general  name  for  that  attitude  of  open  and  earnest 
expectancy.  If  we  then  ask  to  whom  to  pray,  the  answer 
(strangely  enough)  must  be  that  that  does  not  much  matter. 
The  prayer  is  not  indeed  a  purely  subjective  thing; — it  means  a 
real  increase  in  intensity  of  absorption  of  spiritual  power  or 
grace; — but  we  do  not  know  enough  of  what  takes  place  in  the 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  457 

spiritual  world  to  know  how  the  prayer  operates; — who  is  cog- 
nizant of  it,  or  through  what  channel  the  grace  is  given.  Better 
let  children  pray  to  Christ,  who  is  at  any  rate  the  highest  indi- 
vidual spirit  of  whom  we  have  any  knowledge.  But  it  would  be 
rash  to  say  that  Christ  himself  hears  us;  while  to  say  that  God 
hears  us  is  merely  to  restate  the  first  principle — that  grace  flows 
in  from  the  infinite  spiritual  world." 

Let  us  reserve  the  question  of  the  truth  or  falsehood  of 
the  belief  that  power  is  absorbed  until  the  next  lecture,  when 
our  dogmatic  conclusions,  if  we  have  any,  must  be  reached. 
Let  this  lecture  still  confine  itself  to  the  description  of  phe- 
nomena; and  as  a  concrete  example  of  an  extreme  sort,  of  the 
way  in  which  the  prayerful  life  may  still  be  led,  let  me  take 
a  case  with  which  most  of  you  must  be  acquainted,  that  of 
George  Miiller  of  Bristol,  who  died  in  1898.  Muller's  pray^ 
ers  were  of  the  crassest  petitional  order.  Early  in  life  he  re^ 
solved  on  taking  certain  Bible  promises  in  literal  sincerity, 
and  on  letting  himself  be  fed,  not  by  his  own  worldly  fore- 
sight, but  by  the  Lord's  hand.  He  had  an  extraordinarily 
active  and  successful  career,  among  the  fruits  of  which  were 
the  distribution  of  over  two  million  copies  of  the  Scripture 
text,  in  different  languages;  the  equipment  of  several  hun- 
dred missionaries;  the  circulation  of  more  than  a  hundred 
and  eleven  million  of  scriptural  books,  pamphlets,  and 
tracts;  the  building  of  five  large  orphanages,  and  the  keep- 
ing and  educating  of  thousands  of  orphans;  finally,  the 
establishment  of  schools  in  which  over  a  hundred  and 
twenty-one  thousand  youthful  and  adult  pupils  were  taught. 
In  the  course  of  this  work  Mr.  Miiller  received  and  admin- 
istered nearly  a  million  and  a  half  of  pounds  sterling,  and 
traveled  over  two  hundred  thousand  miles  of  sea  and  land.^ 
During  the  sixty-eight  years  of  his  ministry,  he  never  owned 
any  property  except  his  clothes  and  furniture,  and  cash  in 

^  My  authority  for  these  statistics  is  the  little  work  on  Miiller,  by 
Frederic  G.  Warne,  New  York,  1898. 


458       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

hand;  and  he  left,  at  the  age  of  eighty-six,  an  estate  worth 
only  a  hundred  and  sixty  pounds. 

His  method  was  to  let  his  general  wants  be  publicly  known, 
but  not  to  acquaint  other  people  with  the  details  of  his  tempo- 
rary necessities.  For  the  relief  of  the  latter,  he  prayed  directly 
to  the  Lord,  believing  that  sooner  or  later  prayers  are  always 
answered  if  one  have  trust  enough.  "When  I  lose  such  a  thing 
as  a  key,"  he  writes,  "I  ask  the  Lord  to  direct  me  to  it,  and  I 
look  for  an  answer  to  my  prayer;  when  a  person  with  whom  I 
have  m.ade  an  appointment  does  not  come,  according  to  the 
fixed  time,  and  I  begin  to  be  inconvenienced  by  it,  I  ask  the 
Lord  to  be  pleased  to  hasten  him  to  me,  and  I  look  for  an  an- 
swer; when  I  do  not  understand  a  passage  of  the  word  of  God, 
I  lift  up  my  heart  to  the  Lord  that  he  would  be  pleased  by  his 
Holy  Spirit  to  instruct  me,  and  I  expect  to  be  taught,  though  I 
do  not  fix  the  time  when,  and  the  manner  how  it  should  be; 
when  I  am  going  to  minister  in  the  Word,  I  seek  help  from  the 
Lord,  and  .  .  .  am  not  cast  down,  but  of  good  cheer  because 
I  look  for  his  assistance." 

Miiller's  custom  was  to  never  run  up  bills,  not  even  for  a 
week.  "As  the  Lord  deals  out  to  us  by  the  day,  .  .  .  the  week's 
payment  might  become  due  and  we  have  no  money  to  meet  it; 
and  thus  those  with  whom  we  deal  might  be  inconvenienced  by 
us,  and  we  be  found  acting  against  the  commandment  of  the 
Lord:  'Owe  no  man  anything.'  From  this  day  and  henceforward 
whilst  the  Lord  gives  to  us  our  supplies  by  the  day,  we  purpose 
to  pay  at  once  for  every  article  as  it  is  purchased,  and  never  to 
buy  anything  except  we  can  pay  for  it  at  once,  however  much  it 
may  seem  to  be  needed,  and  however  much  those  with  whom 
we  deal  may  wish  to  be  paid  only  by  the  week." 

The  articles  needed  of  which  Miiller  speaks  were  the  food, 
fuel,  etc.,  of  his  orphanages.  Somehow,  near  as  they  often  come 
to  going  without  a  meal,  they  hardly  ever  seem  actually  to  have 
done  so.  "Greater  and  more  manifest  nearness  of  the  Lords 
presence  I  have  never  had  than  when  after  breakfast  there  were 
no  means  for  dinner  for  more  than  a  hundred  persons;  or  when 
after  dinner  there  were  no  means  for  the  tea,  and  yet  the  Lord 


'    OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  459 

provided  the  tea;  and  all  this  without  one  single  human  being 
having  been  informed  about  our  need.  .  .  .  Through  Grace 
my  mind  is  so  fully  assured  of  the  faithfulness  of  the  Lord,  that 
in  the  midst  of  the  greatest  need,  I  am  enabled  in  peace  to  go 
about  my  other  work.  Indeed,  did  not  the  Lord  give  me  this, 
which  is  the  result  of  trusting  in  him,  I  should  scarcely  be  able 
to  work  at  all;  for  it  is  now  comparatively  a  rare  thing  that  a 
day  comes  when  I  am  not  in  need  for  one  or  another  part  of  the 
work."  ^ 

In  building  his  orphanages  simply  by  prayer  and  faith,  Miil- 
ler  affirms  that  his  prime  motive  was  "to  have  something  to 
point  to  as  a  visible  proof  that  our  God  and  Father  is  the  same 
faithful  God  that  he  ever  was — as  willing  as  ever  to  prove  him- 
self the  living  God,  in  our  day  as  formerly,,  to  all  that  put  their 
trust  in  him."  "  For  this  reason  he  refused  to  borrow  money  for 
any  of  his  enterprises.  "How  does  it  work  when  we  thus  antici- 
pate God  by  going  our  own  way  ?  We  certainly  weaken  faith  in- 
stead of  increasing  it;  and  each  time  we  work  thus  a  deliverance 
of  our  own  we  find  it  more  and  more  difficult  to  trust  in  God, 
till  at  last  we  give  way  entirely  to  our  natural  fallen  reason  and 
unbelief  prevails.  How  different  if  one  is  enabled  to  wait  God's 
own  time,  and  to  look  alone  to  him  for  help  and  deliverance! 
When  at  last  help  comes,  after  many  seasons  of  prayer  it  may 
be,  how  sweet  it  is,  and  what  a  present  recompense!  Dear  Chris- 
tian reader,  if  you  have  never  walked  in  this  path  of  obedience 
before,  do  so  now,  and  you  will  then  know  experimentally  the 
sweetness  of  the  joy  which  results  from  it."  ^ 

When  the  supplies  came  in  but  slowly,  Miiller  always  con 
sidered  that  this  was  for  the  trial  of  his  faith  and  patience. 
When  his  faith  and  patience  had  been  sufficiently  tried,  the 
Lord  would  send  more  means.  "And  thus  it  has  proved," — I 
quote  from  his  diary — "for  to-day  was  given  me  the  sum  of 
2050  pounds,  of  which  2000  are  for  the  building  fund  [of  a  cer- 

1  The  Life  of  Trust;  Being  a  Narrative  of  the  Lord's  Dealings  with 
George  Miiller,  New  American  edition,  N.  Y.,  Crowell,  pp.  228,  194, 
219. 

^  Ibid.,  p. -1 26. 

^  Op.  cit.,  p.  383,  abridged. 


460      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

tain  house],  and  50  for  present  necessities.  It  is  impossible  to 
describe  my  joy  in  God  when  I  received  this  donation.  I  was 
neither  excited  nor  surprised;  for  I  loo\  out  for  ansv/ers  to  my 
prayers.  /  believe  that  God  hears  me.  Yet  my  heart  was  so  full 
of  joy  that  I  could  only  sit  before  God,  and  admire  him,  like 
David  in  2  Samuel  vii.  At  last  I  cast  myself  flat  down  upon  my 
face  and  burst  forth  in  thanksgiving  to  God  and  in  surrender- 
ing my  heart  afresh  to  him  for  his  blessed  service."  ^ 

George  Miiller's  is  a  case  extreme  in  every  respect,  and  in 
no  respect  more  so  than  in  the  extraordinary  narrowness  of 
the  man's  intellectual  horizon.  His  God  was,  as  he  often 
said,  his  business  partner.  He  seems  to  have  been  for  Miil- 
ler  little  more  than  a  sort  of  supernatural  clergyman  inter- 
ested in  the  congregation  of  tradesmen  and  others  in  Bris- 
tol who  were  his  saints,  and  in  the  orphanages  and  other 
enterprises,  but  unpossessed  of  any  of  those  vaster  and  wild- 
er "and  more  ideal  attributes  with  which  the  human  imagin- 
ation elsewhere  has  invested  him.  Mtiller,  in  short,  was  abso- 
lutely unphilosophical.  His  intensely  private  and  practical 
conception  of  his  relations  with  the  Deity  continued  the 
traditions  of  the  most  primitive  human  thought.^  When  we 

1  Ibid.,  p.  323. 

2  I  cannot  resist  the  temptation  of  quoting  an  expression  of  an 
even  more  primitive  style  of  religious  thought,  which  I  find  in  Ar- 
ber's  English  Garland,  vol.  vii.  p.  440.  Robert  Lyde,  an  English  sailor, 
along  with  an  English  boy,  being  prisoners  on  a  French  ship  in  1689, 
set  upon  the  crew,  of  seven  Frenchmen,  killed  two,  made  the  other 
five  prisoners,  and  brought  home  the  ship.  Lyde  thus  describes  how 
in  this  feat  he  found  his  God  a  very  present  help  in  time  of  trouble: — 

"With  the  assistance  of  God  I  kept  my  feet  when  they  three  and 
one  more  did  strive  to  throw  me  down.  Feeling  the  Frenchman 
which  hung  about  my  middle  hang  very  heavy,  I  said  to  the  boy,  'Go 
round  the  binnacle,  and  knock  down  that  man  that  hangeth  on  my 
back.'  So  the  boy  did  strike  him  one  blow  on  the  head  which  made 
him  fall.  .  .  .  Then  I  looked  about  for  a  marlin  spike  or  anything 
else  to  strike  them  withal.  But  seeing  nothing,  I  said,  'Lord!  what 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  461 

compare  a  mind  like  his  with  such  a  mind  as,  for  example, 
Emerson's  or  Phillips  Brooks's,  we  sec  the  range  which  the 
religious  consciousness  covers. 

There  is  an  immense  literature  relating  to  answers  to 
petitional  prayer.  The  evangeHcal  journals  are  filled  with 
such  answers,  and  books  are  devoted  to  the  subject/  but 
for  us  Miiller's  case  will  suffice. 

A  less  sturdy  beggar-like  fashion  of  leading  the  prayer- 
ful life  is  followed  by  innumerable  other  Christians.  Per- 
sistence in  leaning  on  the  Almighty  for  support  and  guid- 
ance will,  such  persons  say,  bring  with  it  proofs,  palpable 
but  much  more  subde,  of  his  presence  and  active  influence. 
The  following  description  of  a  "led"  life,  by  a  German 
vsrriter  whom  I  have  already  quoted,  would  no  doubt  ap- 
pear to  countless  Christians  in  every  country  as  if  tran- 

shall  I  do?'  Then  casting  up  my  eye  upon  my  left  side,  and  seeing  a 
marlin  spike  hanging,  I  jerked  my  right  arm  and  took  hold,  and 
struck  the  point  four  dmes  about  a  quarter  of  an  inch  deep  into  the 
skull  of  that  man  that  had  hold  of  my  left  arm.  [One  of  the  French- 
men then  hauled  the  marlin  spike  away  from  him.]  But  through 
God's  wonderful  providence!  it  either  fell  out  of  his  hand,  or  else  he 
threw  it  down,  and  at  this  time  the  Almighty  God  gave  me  strength 
enough  to  take  one  man  in  one  hand,  and  throw  at  the  other's  head; 
and  looking  about  again  to  see  anything  to  strike  them  withal,  but 
seeing  nothing,  I  said,  'Lord!  what  shall  I  do  now?'  And  then  it 
pleased  God  to  put  me  in  mind  of  my  knife  in  my  pocket.  And  al- 
though two  of  the  men  had  hold  of  my  right  arm,  yet  God  Almighty 
strengthened  me  so  that  I  put  my  right  hand  into  my  right  pocket, 
drew  out  the  knife  and  sheath,  .  .  .  put  it  between  my  legs  and 
drew  it  out,  and  then  cut  the  man's  throat  with  it  that  had  his  back 
to  my  breast:  and  he  immediately  dropt  down,  and  scarce  ever 
stirred  after." — I  have  slightly  abridged  Lyde's  narrative. 

^  As,  for  instance,  In  Answer  to  Prayer,  by  the  Bishop  of  Ripok 
and  others,  London,  1898;  Touching  Incidents  and  Remarkable  An- 
swers to  Prayer,  Harrisburg,  Pa.,  1898  (.?);  H.  L.  Hastings:  Tht 
Guiding  Hand,  or  Providential  Direction,  illustrated  by  Authenti* 
Instances,  Boston,  1898  (?). 


462       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

scribed  from  their  own  personal  experience.  One  finds  in 
this  guided  sort  of  Hfe,  says  Dr.  Hilty — 

"That  books  and  words  (and  sometimes  people)  come  to 
one's  cognizance  just  at  the  very  moment  in  which  one  needs 
them;  that  one  glides  over  great  dangers  as  if  with  shut  eyes, 
remaining  ignorant  of  what  would  have  terrified  one  or  led  one 
astray,  until  the  peril  is  past — this  being  especially  the  case  with 
temptations  to  vanity  and  sensuality;  that  paths  on  which  one 
ought  not  to  wander  are,  as  it  were,  hedged  off  with  thorns;  but 
that  on  the  other  side  great  obstacles  are  suddenly  removed; 
that  when  the  time  has  come  for  something,  one  suddenly  re- 
ceives a  courage  that  formerly  failed,  or  perceives  the  root  of  a 
matter  that  until  then  was  concealed,  or  discovers  thoughts, 
talents,  yea,  even  pieces  of  knowledge  and  insight,  in  one's  self, 
of  which  it  is  impossible  to  say  whence  they  come;  finally,  that 
persons  help  us  or  decline  to  help  us,  favor  us  or  refuse  us,  as  if 
they  had  to  do  so  against  their  will,  so  that  often  those  indiffer- 
ent or  even  unfriendly  to  us  yield  us  the  greatest  service  and 
furtherance.  (God  takes  often  their  worldly  goods,  from  those 
whom  he  leads,  at  just  the  right  moment,  when  they  threaten 
to  impede  the  effort  after  higher  interests.) 

"Besides  all  this,  other  noteworthy  things  come  to  pass,  of 
which  it  is  not  easy  to  give  account.  There  is  no  doubt  whatever 
that  now  one  walks  continually  through  'open  doors'  and  on 
the  easiest  roads,  with  as  little  care  and  trouble  as  it  is  possible 
to  imagine. 

"Furthermore  one  finds  one's  self  settling  one's  affairs  neither 
too  early  nor  too  late,  whereas  they  were  wont  to  be  spoiled  by 
untimeliness,  even  when  the  preparations  had  been  well  laid. 
In  addition  to  this,  one  does  them  with  perfect  tranquillity  of 
mind,  almost  as  if  they  were  matters  of  no  consequence,  like 
errands  done  by  us  for  another  person,  in  which  case  we  usually 
act  more  calmly  than  when  we  act  in  our  own  concerns.  Again, 
one  finds  that  one  can  wait  for  everything  patiently,  and  that 
is  one  of  life's  great  arts.  One  finds  also  that  each  thing  comes 
duly,  one  thing  after  the  other,  so  that  one  gains  time  to  make 
one's  footing  sure  before  advancing  farther.  And  then  every- 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  463 

thing  occurs  to  us  at  the  right  moment,  just  what  we  ought  to 
do,  etc.,  and  often  in  a  very  striking  way,  just  as  if  a  third  per- 
son were  keeping  watch  over  those  things  which  we  are  in  easy 
danger  of  forgetting. 

"Often,  too,  persons  are  sent  to  us  at  the  right  time,  to  oflfer 
or  ask  for  what  is  needed,  and  what  we  should  never  have  had 
the  courage  or  resolution  to  undertake  of  our  own  accord. 

"Through  all  these  experiences  one  finds  that  one  is  kindly 
and  tolerant  of  other  people,  even  of  such  as  are  repulsive,  neg 
ligent,  or  ill-willed,  for"  they  also  are  instruments  of  good  in 
God's  hand,  and  often  most  efficient  ones.  Without  these 
thoughts  it  would  be  hard  for  even  the  best  of  us  always  to  keep 
our  equanimity.  But  with  the  consciousness  of  divine  guid' 
ance,  one  sees  many  a  thing  in  life  quite  differently  from  what 
would  otherwise  be  possible. 

"All  these  are  things  that  every  human  being  \nows,  who  ha? 
had  experience  of  them;  and  of  which  the  most  speaking  ex 
amples  could  be  brought  forward.  The  highest   resources  oJ 
worldly  wisdom  are  unable  to  attain  that  which,  under  divine 
leading,  comes  to  us  of  its  own  accord."  ^ 

Such  accounts  as  this  shade  away  into  others  where  the 
belief  is,  not  that  particular  events  are  tempered  more  to- 
wardly  to  us  by  a  superintending  providence,  as  a  rev^^ard 
for  our  reliance,  but  that  by  cultivating  the  continuous  sense 
of  our  connection  with  the  power  that  made  things  as  they 
are,  we  are  tempered  more  towardly  for  their  reception. 
The  outward  face  of  nature  need  not  alter,  but  the  expres- 
sions of  meaning  in  it  alter.  It  was  dead  and  is  alive  again. 
It  is  like  the  difference  between  looking  on  a  person  without 
love,  or  upon  the  same  person  with  love.  In  the  latter  case 
intercourse  springs  into  new  vitality.  So  when  one's  affec- 
tions keep  in  touch  with  the  divinity  of  the  world's  author- 
ship, fear  and  egotism  fall  away;  and  in  the  equanimity  that 
follows,  one  finds  in  the  hours,  as  they  succeed  each  other, 
a  series  of  purely  benigivant  opportunities.  It  is  as  if  all  doorj 

*  C.  Hilty:  Gliick,  Dritter  Theil,  1900,  pp.  92  ff. 


464       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

were  opened,  and  all  paths  freshly  smoothed.  We  meet  a 
new  world  when  we  meet  the  old  world  in  the  spirit  which 
this  kind  of  prayer  infuses. 

Such  a  spirit  was  that  of  Marcus  Aurelius  and  Epictetus.^ 
It  is  that  of  mind-curers,  of  the  transcendentalists,  and  of 
the  so-called  "liberal"  Christians.  As  an  expression  of  it,  I 
will  quote  a  page  from  one  of  Martineau's  sermons : — 

"The  universe,  open  to  the  eye  to-day,  looks  as  it  did  a  thou- 
sand years  ago:  and  the  morning  hymn  of  Milton  does  but  tell 
the  beauty  with  which  our  own  familiar  sun  dressed  the  earliest 
fields  and  gardens  of  the  world.  We  see  what  all  our  fathers 
saw.  And  if  we  cannot  find  God  in  your  house  or  in  mine,  upon 
the  roadside  or  the  margin  of  the  sea;  in  the  bursting  seed  or 
opening  flower;  in  the  day  duty  or  the  night  musing;  in  the 
general  laugh  and  the  secret  grief;  in  the  procession  of  life,  ever 
entering  afresh,  and  solemnly  passing  by  and  dropping  off;  I 
do  not  think  we  should  discern  him  any  more  on  the  grass  of 
Eden,  or  beneath  '.he  moonlight  of  Gethsemane.  Depend  upon 
it,  it  is  not  the  want  of  greater  miracles,  but  of  the  soul  to  per- 
ceive such  as  are  allowed  us  still,  that  makes  us  push  all  the 
sanctities  into  che  far  spaces  we  cannot  reach.  The  devout  feel 
that  wherever  God's  hand  is,  there  is  miracle:  and  it  is  simply 

^  "Good  Heaven!"  says  Epictetus,  "any  one  thing  in  the  creation  is 
sufficient  to  demonstrate  a  Providence,  to  a  humble  and  grateful 
mind.  The  mere  possibility  of  producing  milk  from  grass,  cheese 
from  milk,  and  wool  from  skins;  who  formed  and  planned  it?  Ought 
we  not,  whether  we  dig  or  plough  or  eat,  to  sing  this  hymn  to  God!^ 
Great  is  God,  who  has  supplied  us  with  these  instruments  to  till  the 
ground;  great  is  God,  who  has  given  us  hands  and  instruments  of 
digestion;  who  has  given  us  to  grow  insensibly  and  to  breathe  in 
sleep.  These  things  we  ought  forever  to  celebrate.  .  .  .  But  because 
the  most  of  you  are  blind  and  insensible,  there  must  be  some  one  to 
fill  this  station,  and  lead,  in  behalf  of  all  men,  the  hymn  to  God;  for 
what  else  can  I  do,  a  lame  old  man,  but  sing  hynins  to  God?  Were  I 
»  nightingale,  I  would  act  the  part  of  a  nightingale;  were  I  a  swan, 
the  part  of  a  swan.  But  since  I  am  a  reasonable  creature,  it  is  my  duty 
to  praise  God  .  .  .  and  I  call  on  you  to  join  the  same  song."  Works, 
book  i.  ch.  xvi.,  Carter-Higginson  transladon,  abridged. 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  465 

an  indevoutness  which  imagines  that  only  where  miracle  is,  can 
there  be  the  real  hand  of  God.  The  customs  o£  Heaven  ought 
surely  to  be  more  sacred  in  our  eyes  than  its  anomalies;  the  dear 
old  ways,  of  which  the  Most  High  is  never  tired,  than  the 
strange  things  which  he  does  not  love  well  enough  ever  to  re- 
peat. And  he  who  will  but  discern  beneath  the  sun,  as  he  rises 
any  morning,  the  supporting  linger  of  the  Almighty,  may  re- 
cover the  sweet  and  reverent  surprise  with  which  Adam  gazed 
on  the  first  dawn  in  Paradise.  It  is  no  outward  change,  no  shift- 
ing in  time  or  place;  but  only  the  loving  meditation  of  the  pure 
in  heart,  that  can  reawaken  the  Eternal  from  the  sleep  within 
our  souls:  that  can  render  him  a  reality  again,  and  reassert  for 
him  once  more  his  ancient  name  of  'the  Living  God.' "  ^ 

When  we  see  all  things  in  God,  and  refer  all  things  to 
him,  we  read  in  common  matters  superior  expressions  of 
meaning.  The  deadness  with  which  custom  invests  the  fa- 
miliar vanishes,  and  existence  as  a  whole  appears  transfig- 
ured. The  state  of  a  mind  thus  awakened  from  torpor  is 
well  expressed  in  these  words,  which  I  take  from  a  friend's 
letter:— 

"If  we  occupy  ourselves  in  summing  up  all  the  mercies  and 
bounties  we  are  privileged  to  have,  we  are  overwhelmed  by 
their  number  (so  great  that  we  can  imagine  ourselves  unable  to 
give  ourselves  time  even  to  begin  to  review  the  things  we  may 
imagine  we  have  not).  We  sum  them  and  realize  that  we  are 
actually  \illed  with  God's  \indness;  that  vve  are  surrounded  by 
bounties  upon  bounties,  without  which  all  would  fall.  Should 
we  not  love  it;  should  we  not  feel  buoyed  up  by  the  Eternal 
Arms?" 

Sometimes  this  realization  that  facts  are  of  divine  send- 
ing, instead  of  being  habitual,  is  casual,  like  a  mystical  ex- 

^  James  Martineau:  end  of  the  sermon  "Help  Thou  Mine  Unbe- 
lief," in  Endeavours  after  a  Christian  Life,  2d  series.  Compare  with 
this  page  the  exd-act  from  Voysey  on  p.  270,  above,  and  those  from 
Pa<-cal  and  Madame  Guyon  on  p.  281. 


466       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

perience.  Father  Gratry  gives  this  instance  from  his  youth- 
ful melancholy  period: — 

"One  day  I  had  a  moment  of  consolation,  because  I  met  with 
something  which  seemed  to  me  ideally  perfect.  It  was  a  poor 
drummer  beating  the  tattoo  in  the  streets  of  Paris.  I  walked  be- 
hind him  in  returning  to  the  school  on  the  evening  of  a  holi- 
day. His  drum  gave  out  the  tattoo  in  such  a  way  that,  at  that 
moment  at  least,  however  peevish  I  were,  I  could  find  no  pre- 
text for  fault-finding.  It  was  impossible  to  conceive  more  nerve 
or  spirit,  better  time  or  measure,  more  clearness  or  richness, 
than  were  in  this  drumming.  Ideal  desire  could  go  no  farther  in 
that  direction.  I  was  enchanted  and  consoled;  the  perfection  of 
this  wretched  act  did  me  good.  Good  is  at  least  possible,  I  said, 
since  the  ideal  can  thus  sometimes  get  embodied."  ^ 

In  Senancour's  novel  of  Obermann  a  similar  transient 
lifting  of  the  veil  is  recorded.  In  Paris  streets,  on  a  March 
day,  he  comes  across  a  flower  in  bloom,  a  jonquil: 

"It  was  the  strongest  expression  of  desire:  it  was  the  first 
perfume  of  the  year.  I  felt  all  the  happiness  destined  for  man. 
This  unutterable  harmony  of  souls,  the  phantom  of  the  ideal 
world,  arose  in  me  complete.  I  never  felt  anything  so  great  or 
so  instantaneous.  I  know  not  what  shape,  what  analogy,  what 
secret  of  relation  it  was  that  made  me  see  in  this  flower  a  limit- 
less beauty.  ...  I  shall  never  inclose  in  a  conception  this 
power,  this  immensity  that  nothing  will  express;  this  form  that 
nothing  will  contain;  this  ideal  of  a  better  world  which  one 
feels,  but  which,  it  seems,  nature  has  not  made  actual."  " 

We  heard  in  previous  lectures  of  the  vivified  face  of  the 
world  as  it  may  appear  to  converts  after  their  awakening.^ 
As  a  rule,  religious  persons  generally  assume  that  whatever 

^  Souvenirs  de  ma  Jeunesse,  1897,  p.  122. 
2  Op.  cit.,  Letter  XXX. 

^  Above,  p.  243  ff.  Compare  the  withdrawal  of  expression  from  the 
world,  in  Melancholiacs,  p.  148. 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  467 

natural  facts  connect  themselves' in  any  way  with  their  des- 
tiny are  significant  of  the  divine  purposes  with  them. 
Through  prayer  the  purpose,  often  far  from  obvious,  comes 
home  to  them,  and  if  it  be  "trial,"  strength  to  endure  the 
trial  is  given.  Thus  at  all  stages  of  the  prayerful  life  we  find 
the  persuasion  that  in  the  process  of  communion  energy 
from  on  high  flows  in  to  meet  demand,  and  becomes  opera- 
tive within  the  phenomenal  world.  So  long  as  this  opera- 
tiveness  is  admitted  to  be  real,  it  makes  no  essential  differ- 
ence whether  its  immediate  effects  be  subjectiye  or  objective. 
The  fundamental  religious  point  is  that  in  prayer,  spiritual 
energy,  which  otherwise  would  slumber,  does  become  ac- 
tive, and  spiritual  work  of  some  kind  is  effected  really. 

So  much  for  Prayer,  taken  in  the  wide  sense  of  any  kind 
of  communion.  As  the  core  of  religion,  we  must  return  to 
it  in  the  next  lecture. 

The  last  aspect  of  the  religious  life  which  remains  for  me 
to  touch  upon  is  the  fact  that  its  manifestations  so  frequently 
connect  themselves  with  the  subconscious  part  of  our  exist- 
ence. You  may  remember  what  I  said  in  my  opening  lec- 
ture ^  about  the  prevalence  of  the  psychopathic  temperament 
in  religious  biography.  You  will  in  point  of  fact  hardly  find 
a  religious  leader  of  any  kind  in  whose  life  there  is  no  rec- 
ord of  automatisms.  I  speak  Uot  merely  of  savage  priests  and 
prophets,  whose  followers  regard  automatic  utterance  and 
action  as  by  itself  tantamount  to  inspiration,  I  speak  of 
leaders  of  thought  and  subjects  of  intellectualized  experi- 
ence. Saint  Paul  had  his  visions,  his  ecstasies,  his  gift  of 
tongues,  small  as  was  the  importance  he  attached  to  the  lat- 
ter. The  whole  array  of  Christian  saints  and  heresiarchs,  in- 
cluding the  greatest,  the  Barnards,  the  Loyolas,  the  Luthers, 
the  Foxes,  the  Wesleys,  had  their  visions,  voices,  rapt  condi- 
tions, guiding  impressions,  and  "openings."  They  had  these 

^  Above,  pp.  25,  26. 


468       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

things,  because  they  had  exalted  sensibility,  and  to  such 
things  persons  of  exalted  sensibility  are  liable.  In  such  lia- 
bility there  lie,  however,  consequences  for  theology.  Beliefs 
are  strengthened  wherever  automatisms  corroborate  them. 
Incursions  from  beyond  the  transmarginal  region  have  a 
peculiar  power  to  increase  conviction.  The  inchoate  sense  of 
presence  is  infinitely  stronger  than  conception,  but  strong  as 
it  may  be,  it  is  seldom  equal  to  the  evidence  of  hallucination. 
Saints  who  actually  see  or  hear  their  Saviour  reach  the  acme 
of  assurance.  Motor  automatisms,  though  rarer,  are,  if  pos- 
sible, even  more  convincing  than  sensations.  The  subjects 
here  actually  feel  themselves  played  upon  by  powers  beyond 
their  will.  The  evidence  is  dynamic;  the  God  or  spirit  moves 
the  very  organs  of  their  body.-* 

The  great  field  for  this  sense  of  being  the  instrument  of 
a  higher  power  is  of  course  'inspiration."  It  is  easy  to  dis- 
:riminate   between   the   religious   leaders    who   have   been 

1  A  friend  of  mine,  a  first-rate  psychologist,  who  is  a  subject  of 
graphic  automatism,  tells  me  that  the  appearance  of  independent 
actuation  in  the  movements  of  his  arm,  when  he  writes  automatically, 
is  so  distinct  that  it  obliges  him  to  abandon  a  psychophysical  theory 
which  he  had  previously  believed  in,  the  theory,  namely,  that  we 
have  no  feeling  of  the  discharge  downwards  of  our  voluntary  motor- 
centres.  We  must  normally  have  such  a  feeling,  he  thinks,  or  the 
sense  of  an  absence  would  not  be  so  striking  as  it  is  in  these  exper- 
iences. Graphic  automatism  of  a  fully  developed  kind  is  rare  in  reli- 
gious history,  so  far  as  my  knowledge  goes.  Such  statements  as  An- 
tonia  Bourignon's,  that  "I  do  nothing  but  lend  my  hand  and  spirit  to 
another  power  than  mine,"  is  shown  by  the  context  to  indicate  in- 
spiration rather  than  directly  automatic  writing.  In  some  eccentric 
sects  this  latter  occurs.  The  most  striking  instance  of  it  is  probably  the 
bulky  volume  called,  "Oahspe,  a  new  Bible  in  the  Words  of  Jehovah 
and  his  angel  ambassadors,"  Boston  and  London,  1891,  written  and 
illustrated  automatically  by  Dr.  Newbrough  of  New  York,  whom  I 
understand  to  be  now,  or  to  have  been  lately,  at  the  head  of  the 
spiritistic  community  of  Shalam  in  New  Mexico.  The  latest  auto- 
madcally  written  book  which  has  come  under  my  notice  is  "Zertou- 
lem's  Wisdom  of  the  Ages,'  by  George  A.  Fuller,  Boston,  1901, 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  469 

habitually  subject  to  inspiration  and  those  who  have  not.  In 
the  teachings  o£  the  Buddha,  o£  Jesus,  of  Saint  Paul  (apart 
from  his  gift  of  tongues),  of  Saint  Augustine,  of  Huss,  of 
Luther,  of  Wesley,  automatic  or  semi-automatic  composi- 
tion appears  to  have  been  only  occasional.  In  the  Hebrew 
prophets,  on  the  contrary,  in  Mohamm^ed,  in  some  of  the 
Alexandrians,  in  many  minor  Catholic  saints,  in  Fox,  in 
Joseph  Smith,  something  like  it  appears  to  have  been  fre- 
quent, sometimes  habitual.  We  have  distinct  professions  of 
being  under  the  direction  of  a  foreign  power,  and  serving  as 
its  mouthpiece.  As  regards  the  Hebrew  prophets,  it  is  extra- 
ordinary, writes  an  author  who  has  made  a  careful  study  of 
them,  to  see — 

"How,  one  after  another,  the  same  features  are  reproduced  in 
the  prophetic  books.  The  process  is  always  extremely  diflferent 
from  what  it  would  be  if  the  prophet  arrived  at  his  insight  into 
spiritual  things  by  the  tentative  efforts  of  his  own  genius.  There 
is  something  sharp  and  sudden  about  it.  He  can  lay  his  finger, 
so  to  speak,  on  the  moment  when  it  came.  And  it  always  comes 
in  the  form  of  an  overpowering  force  from  without,  against 
which  he  struggles,  but  in  vain.  Listen,  for  instance,  [to]  the 
opening  of  the  book  of  Jeremiah.  Read  through  in  like  manner 
the  first  two  chapters  of  the  prophecy  of  Ezekiel. 

"It  is  not,  however,  only  at  the  beginning  of  his  career  that 
the  prophet  passes  through  a  crisis  which  is  clearly  not  self- 
caused.  Scattered  all  through  the  prophetic  writings  are  expres- 
sions which  speak  of  some  strong  and  irresistible  impulse  com- 
ing down  upon  the  prophet,  determining  his  attitude  to  the 
events  of  his  time,  constraining  his  utterance,  making  his  words 
the  vehicle  of  a  higher  meaning  than  their  own.  For  instance, 
this  of  Isaiah's:  'The  Lord  spake  thus  to  me  with  a  strong 
hand,' — an  emphatic  phrase  which  denotes  the  overmastering 
nature  of  the  impulse — 'and  instructed  me  that  I  should  not 
walk  in  the  way  of  this  people.'  ...  Or  passages  like  this  from 
Ezekiel:  'The  hand  of  the  Lord  God  fell  upon  me,'  'The  hand 
of  the  Lord  was  strong  upon  me.'  T'he  one  standing  character 


470      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

istic  of  the  prophet  is  that  he  speaks  with  the  authority  of  Je- 
hovah himself.  Hence  it  is  that  the  prophets  one  and  all  preface 
their  addresses  so  confidently,  'The  Word  of  the  Lord,'  or  'Thus 
saith  the  Lord.'  They  have  even  the  audacity  to  speak  in  the 
first  person,  as  if  Jehovah  himself  were  speaking.  As  in  Isaiah: 
'Hearken  unto  me,  O  Jacob,  and  Israel  my  called;  I  am  He,  I 
am  the  First,  I  also  am  the  last,' — and  so  on.  The  personality 
of  the  prophet  sinks  entirely  into  the  background;  he  feels  him- 
self for  the  time  being  the  mouthpiece  of  the  Almighty."  ^ 
I  ■"We  need  to  remember  that  prophecy  was  a  profession,  and 
that  the  prophets  formed  a  professional  class.  There  were  schools 
of  the  prophets,  in  which  the  gift  was  regularly  cultivated.  A 
group  of  young  men  would  gather  round  some  commanding 
figure — a  Samuel  or  an  Elisha — and  would  not  only  record  or 
spread  the  knowledge  of  his  sayings  and  doings,  but  seek  to 
catch  themselves  something  of  his  inspiration.  It  seems  that 
music  played  its  part  in  their  exercises.  ...  It  is  perfectly 
clear  that  by  no  means  all  of  these  Sons  of  the  prophets  ever 
succeeded  in  acquiring  more  than  a  very  small  share  in  the 
gift  which  they  sought.  It  was  clearly  possible  to  'counterfeit' 
prophecy.  Sometimes  this  was  done  deliberately.  .  .  .  But  it 
by  no  means  follows  that  in  all  cases  where  a  false  message  was 
given,  the  giver  of  it  was  altogether  conscious  of  what  he  was 
doing."  ^ 

Here,  to  take  another  Jewish  case,  is  the  way  in  which 
Philo  of  Alexandria  describes  his  inspiration:— 

"Sometimes,  when  I  have  come  to  my  work  empty,  I  have 
suddenly  become  full;  ideas  being  in  an  invisible  manner  show- 
ered upon  me,  and  implanted  in  me  from  on  high;  so  that 
through  the  influence  of  divine  inspiration,  I  have  become 
greatly  excited,  and  have  known  neither  the  place  in  which  I 
was,  nor  those  who  were  present,  nor  myself,  nor  what  I  was 

^W.  Sand.w:  The  Oracles  of  God,  London,  1892,  pp.  49-56, 
abridged. 

^Op.  cit.,  p.  91.  This  author  also  cites  Moses's  and  Isaiah's  com- 
missions, as  given  in  Exodus,  chaps,  iii.  and  iv.,  and  Isaiah,  chap.  vi. 


OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS  47I 

saying,  nor  what  I  was  writing;  for  then  I  have  been  consciou5 
of  a  richness  of  interpretation,  an  enjoyment  of  light,  a  most 
penetrating  insight,  a  most  manifest  energy  in  all  that  was  to 
be  done;  having  such  effect  on  my  mind  as  the  clearest  ocular 
demonstration  would  have  on  the  eyes."  ^ 

If  we  turn  to  Islam,  we  find  that  Mohammed's  revelations 
all  came  from  the  subconscious  sphere.  To  the  question  in 
what  way  he  got  them — 

"Mohammed  is  said  to  have  answered  that  sometimes  he 
heard  a  knell  as  from  a  bell,  and  that  this  had  the  strongest 
effect  on  him;  and  when  the  angel  went  away,  he  had  received 
the  revelation.  Sometimes  again  he  held  converse  with  the  angel 
as  with  a  man,  so  as  easily  to  understand  his  words.  The  later 
authorities,  however,  .  .  .  distinguish  still  other  kinds.  In  the 
Itgan  (103)  the  following  are  enumerated:  i,  revelations  with 
sound  of  bell,  2,  by  inspiration  of  the  holy  spirit  in  M.'s  heart. 
3,  by  Gabriel  in  human  form,  4,  by  God  immediately,  either 
when  awake  (as  in  his  journey  to  heaven)  or  in  dream.  .  .  . 
In  Almawahib  alladuniya  the  kinds  are  thus  given:  i.  Dream, 
2,  Inspiration  of  Gabriel  in  the  Prophet's  heart,  3,  Gabriel  tak- 
ing Dahya's  form,  4,  with  the  bell-sound,  etc.,  5,  Gabriel  in 
propria  persona  (only  twice),  6,  revelation  in  heaven,  7,  God 
appearing  in  person,  but  veiled,  8,  God  revealing  himself  im- 
mediately without  veil.  Others  add  two  other  stages,  namely: 
I,  Gabriel  in  the  form  of  still  another  man,  2,  God  -showing 
nimself  personally  in  dream."  ^ 

In  none  of  these  cases  is  the  revelation  distinctly  motor. 
In  the  case  of  Joseph  Smith  (who  had  prophetic  revelations 
innumerable  in  addition  to  the  revealed  translation  of  the 

^  Quoted  by  Augustus  Clissold:  The  Prophetic  Spirit  in  Genius 
and  Madness,  1870,  p.  67.  Mr.  Clissold  is  a  Swedenborgian.  Sweden- 
borg's  case  is  of  course  the  palmary  one  of  audita  et  visa,  serving  as  a 
basis  of  religious  revelation. 

^NoLDEKE,  Geschichte  des  Qorans,  i860,  p.  16.  Compare  the  fullei 
account  in  Sir  William  Muir's:  Life  of  Mahomet,  3d  ed.,  1894,  ch.  iil 


472      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

gold  plates  which  resulted  in  the  Book  of  Mormon),  al- 
though there  may  have  been  a  motor  element,  the  inspira- 
tion seems  to  have  been  predominantly  sensorial.  He  began 
his  translation  by  the  aid  of  the  "peep-stones"  which  he 
found,  or  thought  or  said  that  he  found,  with  the  gold  plates 
— apparently  a  case  of  "crystal  gazing."  For  some  of  the 
other  revelations  he  used  the  peep-stones,  but  seems  gen- 
erally to  have  asked  the  Lord  for  more  direct  instruction.^ 

Other  revelations  are  described  as  "openings" — Fox's,  for 
example,  were  evidently  of  the  kind  known  in  spiritistic 
circles  of  to-day  as  "impressions."  As  all  effective  initiators 
of  change  must  needs  live  to  some  degree  upon  this  psycho- 
pathic level  of  sudden  perception  or  conviction  of  new  truth, 
or  of  impulse  to  action  so  obsessive  that  it  must  be  worked 
off,  I  will  say  nothing  more  about  so  very  common  a  phe- 
nomenon. 

When,  in  addition  to  these  phenomena  of  inspiration,  we 
take  religious  mysticism  into  the  account,  when  we  recall 
the  striking  and  sudden  unifications  of  a  discordant  self 
which  we  saw  in  conversion,  and  when  we  review  the  ex 

^  The  Mormon  theocracy  has  always  been  governed  by  direct  reve- 
lations accorded  to  the  President  of  the  Church  and  its  Aposdes. 
From  an  obliging  letter  written  to  me  in  1899  by  an  eminent  Mor- 
mon, I  quote  the  following  extract: — 

"It  may  be  very  interesting  for  you  to  know  that  the  President  [Mr. 
Snow]  of  the  Mormon  Church  claims  to  have  had  a  number  of  reve- 
ladons  very  recently  from  heaven.  To  explain  fully  what  these  reve- 
lations are,  it  is  necessary  to  know  that  we,  as  a  people,  believe  that 
the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  has  again  been  established  through  mes- 
sengers sent  from  heaven.  This  Church  has  at  its  head  a  prophet, 
seer,  and  revelator,  who  gives  to  man  God's  holy  will.  Revelation  is 
die  means  through  which  the  will  of  God  is  declared  directly  and  in 
fullness  to  man.  These  revelations  are  got  through  dreams  of  sleep  or 
in  waking  visions  of  the  mind,  by  voices  without  visional  appearance, 
or  by  actual  manifestations  of  the  Holy  Presence  before  the  eye.  We 
believe  that  God  has  come  in  person  and  spoken  to  our  prophet  and 
'evelator." 


OTHER   CHARACTERISTICS  473 

travagant  obsessions  of  tenderness,  purity,  and  self-severity 
met  with  in  saintliness,  we  cannot,  I  think,  avoid  the  con- 
clusion that  in  reUgion  we  have  a  department  of  human 
nature  with  unusually  close  relations  to  the  transmarginal 
or  subliminal  region.  If  the  word  "subliminal"  is  oiTensive 
to  any  of  you,  as  smelling  too  much  of  psychical  research 
or  other  aberrations,  call  it  by  any  other  name  you  please, 
to  distinguish  it  from  the  level  of  full  sunlit  consciousness. 
Call  this  latter  the  A-region  of  personality,  if  you  care  to, 
and  call  the  other  the  B-region.  The  B-region,  then,  is  ob- 
viously the  larger  part  of  each  of  us,  for  it  is  the  abode  of 
everything  that  is  latent  and  the  reservoir  of  everything  that 
passes  unrecorded  or  unobserved.  It  contains,  for  example, 
such  things  as  all  our  momentarily  inactive  memories,  and 
it  harbors  the  springs  of  all  our  obscurely  motived  passions, 
impulses,  likes,  dislikes,  and  prejudices.  Our  intuitions, 
hypotheses,  fancies,  superstitions,  persuasions,  convictions, 
and  in  general  all  our  non-rational  operations,  come  from  it. 
It  is  the  source  of  our  dreams,  and  apparently  they  may  re- 
turn to  it.  In  it  arise  whatever  mystical  experiences  we  may 
have,  and  our  automatisms,  sensory  or  motor;  our  life  in 
hypnotic  and  "hypnoid"  conditions,  if  we  are  subjects  to 
such  conditions;  our  delusions,  fixed  ideas,  and  hysterical 
accidents,  if  we  are  hysteric  subjects;  our  supra-normal  cog- 
nitions, if  such  there  be,  and  if  we  are  telepathic  subjects.  It 
is  also  the  fountain-head  of  much  that  feeds  our  religion. 
In  persons  deep  in  the  religious  life,  as  we  have  now  abun- 
dantly seen — and  this  is  my  conclusion — the  door  into  this 
region  seems  unustially  wide  open;  at  any  rate,  experiences 
making  their  entrance  through  that  door  have  had  emphatic 
influence  in  shaping  religious  history. 

With  this  conclusion  I  turn  back  and  c^se  the  circle 
which  I  opened  in  my  first  lecture,  terminating  thus  the 
review  which  I  then  announced  of  inner  religious  phenom- 
ena as  we  find  them  in  developed  and  articulate  human 


474       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

individuals.  I  might  easily,  if  the  time  allowed,  multiply 
both  my  documents  and  my  discriminations,  but  a  broad 
treatment  is,  I  believe,  in  itself  better,  and  the  most  impor- 
tant characteristics  of  the  subject  lie,  I  think,  before  us  al- 
ready. In  the  next  lecture,  which  is  also  the  last  one,  we 
must  try  to  draw  the  critical  conclusions  which  so  much 
material  may  suggest. 


Lecture  XX 
CONCLUSIONS 

THE  material  of  our  study  of  human  nature  is  now  \ 
spread  before  us;  and  in  this  parting  hour,  set  free  from 
the  duty  of  description,  we  can  draw  our  theoretical  and 
practical  conclusions.  In  my  first  lecture,  defending  the 
empirical  method,  I  foretold  that  whatever  conclusions  we 
might  come  to  could  be  reached  by  spiritual  judgments  only, 
appreciations  of  the  significance  for  life  of  religion.,  taken 
"on  the  whole."  Our  conclusions  cannot  be  as  sharp  as  dog- 
matic conclusions  would  be,  but  I  will  formulate  them, 
when  the  time  comes,  as  sharply  as  I  can. 

Summing  up  in  the  broadest  possible  way  the  character- 
istics of  the  religious  life,  as  we  have  found  them,  it  includes 
the  following  beliefs: — 

1.  That  the  visible  world  is  part  of  a  more  spiritual  uni- 
verse from  which  it  drav/s  its  chief  significance; 

2.  That  union  or  harmonious  relation  with  that  higher 
universe  is  our  true  end; 

3.  That  prayer  or  inner  communion  with  the  spirit  there- 
of— be  that  spirit  "God"  or  "law" — is  a  process  wherein 
work  is  really  done,  and  spiritual  energy  flows  in  and  pro- 
duces effects,  psychological  or  material,  within  the  phe- 
nomenal world. 

Religion  includes  also  the  following  psychological  char- 
acteristics : — 

4.  A  new  zest  which  adds  itself  like  a  gift  to  life,  and 
takes  the  form  either  of' lyrical  enchantment  or  of  appeal  to 
earnestness  and  heroism. 

475 


476       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

5.  An  assurance  of  safety  and  a  temper  of  peace,  and,  in 
relation  to  others,  a  preponderance  of  loving  affections. 

In  illustrating  these  characteristics  by  documents,  we  have 
been  literally  bathed  in  sentiment.  In  re-reading  my  manu- 
script, I  am  almost  appalled  at  the  amount  of  emotionality 
which  I  find  in  it.  After  so  much  of  this,  we  can  afford  to 
be  dryer  and  less  sympathetic  in  the  rest  of  the  work  that 
lies  before  us. 

The  sentimentality  of  many  of  my  documents  is  a  conse- 
quence of  the  fact  that  I  sought  them  among  the  extrava- 
gances of  the  subject.  If  any  of  you  are  enemies  of  what 
our  ancestors  used  to  brand  as  enthusiasm,  and  are,  never- 
theless, still  listening  to  me  now,  you  have  probably  felt  my 
selection  to  have  been  sometimes  almost  perverse,  and  have 
wished  I  might  have  stuck  to  soberer  examples.  I  reply  that 
I  took  these  extremer  examples  as  yielding  the  profounder 
information.  To  learn  the  secrets  of  any  science,  we  go  to 
expert  specialists,  even  though  they  may  be  eccentric  per- 
sons, and  not  to  commonplace  pupils.  We  combine  what 
they  tell  us  with  the  rest  of  our  wisdom,  and  form  our  final 
judgment  independently.  Even  so  with  religion.  We  who 
have  pursued  such  radical  expressions  of  it  may  now  be 
sure  that  we  know  its  secrets  as  authentically  as  anyone  can 
know  them  who  learns  them  from  another;  and  we  have 
next  to  answer,  each  of  us  for  himself,  the  practical  ques- 
tion: what  are  the  dangers  in  this  element  of  life?  and  in 
what  proportion  may  it  need  to  be  restrained  by  other  ele- 
ments, to  give  the  proper  balance  .f' 

But  this  question  suggests  another  one  which  I  will  an- 
swer immediately  and  get  it  out  of  the  way,  for  it  has  more 
than  once  already  vexed  us.^  Ought  it  to  be  assumed  that 
in  all  men  the  mixture  of  religion  with  other  elements 
should  be  identical?  Ought  it,  indeed,  to  be  assumed  that 

1  For  example,  on  pages  133,  160,  326  above. 


CONCLUSIONS  47^ 

the  lives  of  all  men  should  show  identical  religious  ele- 
ments? In  other  words,  is  the  existence  of  so  many  reli- 
gious types  and  sects  and  creeds  regrettable? 

To  these  questions  I  answer  "No"  emphatically.  And  my 
reason  is  that  I  do  not  see  how  it  is  possible  that  creatures 
in  such  different  positions  and  with  such  different  powers 
as  human  individuals  are,  should  have  exactly  the  same 
functions  and  the  same  duties.  No  two  of  us  have  identical 
difficulties,  nor  should  we  be  expected  to  work  out  identical 
solutions.  Each,  from  his  peculiar  angle  of  observation,  takes 
in  a  certain  sphere  of  fact  and  trouble,  which  each  must 
deal  with  in  a  unique  manner.  One  of  us  must  soften  him- 
self, another  must  harden  himself;  one  must  yield  a  point, 
another  must  stand  firm — in  order  the  better  to  defend  the 
position  assigned  him.  If  an  Emerson  were  forced  to  be  a 
Wesley,  or  a  Moody  forced  to  be  a  Whitman,  the  total  hu- 
man consciousness  of  the  divine  would  suffer.  The  divine 
can  mean  no  single  quality,  it  must  mean  a  group  of  quali- 
ties, by  being  champions  of  which  in  alternation,  different 
men  may  all  find  worthy  missions.  Each  attitude  being  a 
syllable  in  human  nature's  total  message,  it  takes  the  whole 
of  us  to  spell  the  meaning  out  completely.  So  a  "god  of 
battles"  must  be  allowed  to  be  the  god  for  one  kind  of 
person,  a  god  of  peace  and  heaven  and  home,  the  god  for 
another.  We  must  frankly  recognize  the  fact  that  we  live 
in  partial  systems,  and  that  parts  are  not  interchangeable 
in  the  spiritual  life.  If  we  are  peevish  and  jealous,  destruc- 
tion of  the  self  must  be  an  element  of  our  religion;  why 
need  it  be  one  if  we  are  good  and  sympathetic  from  the 
outset?  If  we  are  sick  souls,  we  require  a  reUgion  of  de- 
liverance; but  why  think  so  much  of  deliverance,  if  we  are 
healthy-minded  ?  ^  Unquestionably,  some  men  have  the  com- 

^  From  this  point  of  view,  the  contrasts  between  the  healthy  and 
the  morbid  mind,  and  between  the  once-born  and  the  twice-born 
types,  of  which  I  spoke  in  earlier  lectures  (see  pp.  159-164),  cease  to  bf 


478       THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

pleter  experience  and  the  higher  vocation,  here  just  as  in 
the  social  world;  but  for  each  man  to  stay  in  his  own  ex- 
perience, whate'er  it  be,  and  for  others  to  tolerate  him  there> 
is  surely  best. 

But,  you  may  now  ask,  would  not  this  o.iC-sidedness  be 
cured  if  we  should  all  espouse  the  science  of  religions  as 
our  own  religion?  In  answering  this  question  I  must  open 
again  the  general  relations  of  the  theoretic  to  the  active  life. 

Knowledge  about  a  thing  is  not  the  thing  itself.  You  re- 
member what  Al-Ghazzali  told  us  in  the  Lecture  on  Mysti- 
cism— that  to  understand  the  causes  of  drunkenness,  as  a 
physician  understands  them,  is  not  to  be  drunk.  A  science 
might  come  to  understand  everything  about  the  causes  and 
elements  of  religion,  and  might  even  decide  which  ele- 
ments were  qualified,  by  their  general  harmony  with  other 

the  radical  antagonisms  which  many  think  them.  The  twice-born 
look  down  upon  the  rectilinear  consciousness  of  life  of  the  once-born 
as  being  "mere  morality,"  and  not  properly  religion.  "Dr.  Chan- 
ning,"  an  orthodox  minister  is  reported  to  have  said,  "is  excluded 
from  the  highest  form  of  religious  life  by  the  extraordinary  rectitude 
of  his  character."  It  is  indeed  true  that  the  outlook  upon  life  of  the 
twice-born — holding  as  it  does  more  of  the  element  of  evil  in  solu- 
tion— is  the  wider  and  completer.  The  "heroic"  or  "solemn"  way  in 
which  life  comes  to  them  is  a  "higher  synthesis"  into  which  healthy- 
mindedness  and  morbidness  both  enter  and  combine.  Evil  is  not 
evaded,  but  sublated  in  the  higher  religious  cheer  of  these  persons 
(see  pp.  47-52,  354-357).  But  the  final  consciousness  which  each  type 
reaches  of  union  with  the  divine  has  the  same  practical  significance 
for  the  individual;  and  individuals  may  well  be  allowed  to  get  to  it 
by  the  channels  which  lie  most  open  to  their  several  temperaments. 
In  the  cases  which  were  quoted  in  Lecture  IV,  of  the  mind-cure 
form  of  healthy-mindedness,  we  found  abundant  examples  of  regen- 
erative process.  The  severity  of  the  crisis  in  this  process  is  a  matter  of 
degree.  How  long  one  shall  continue  to  drink  the  consciousness  of 
evil,  and  when  one  shall  begin  to  short-circuit  and  get  rid  of  it,  are 
also  matters  of  amount  and  degree,  so  that  in  many  instances  it  is 
quite  arbitrary  whether  we  class  the  individual  as  a  once-born  or  a 
twice-born  subject 


CONCLUSIONS  479 

branches  of  knowledge,  to  be  considered  true;  and  yet  the 
best  man  at  this  science  might  be  the  man  who  found  it 
hardest  to  be  personally  devout.  Tout  savoir  c'est  tout  par- 
donner.  The  name  of  Renan  would  doubtless  occur  to 
many  persons  as  an  example  of  the  way  in  which  breadth 
of  knowledge  may  make  one  only  a  dilettante  in  possibil- 
ities, and  blunt  the  acuteness  of  one's  living  faith.^  If  re- 
ligion be  a  function  by  which  either  God's  cause  or  man's 
cause  is  to  be  really  advanced,  then  he  who  lives  the  life  of 
it,  however  narrowly,  is  a  better  servant  than  he  who  mere- 
ly knows  about  it,  however  much.  Knowledge  about  life  is 
one  thing;  effective  occupation  of  a  place  in  life,  with  its 
dynamic  currents  passing  through  your  being,  is  another. 

For  this  reason,  the  science  of  religions  may  not  be  an 
equivalent  for  living  religion;  and  if  we  turn  to  the  inner 
difficulties  of  such  a  science,  we  see  that  a  point  comes  when 
she  must  drop  the  purely  theoretic  attitude,  and  either  let 
her  knots  remain  uncut,  or  have  them  cut  by  active  faith.  To 
see  this,  suppose  that  we  have  our  science  of  religions  con- 
stituted as  a  matter  of  fact.  Suppose  that  she  has  assimilated 
all  the  necessary  historical  material  and  distilled  out  of  it  as 
its  essence  the  same  conclusions  which  I  myself  a  few  mo- 
ments ago  pronounced.  Suppose  that  she  agrees  that  re- 
ligion, wherever  it  is  an  active  thing,  involves  a  belief  in 
ideal  presences,  and  a  belief  that  in  our  prayerful  com- 
munion with  them,"  work  is  done,  and  something  real 
comes  to  pass.  She  has  now  to  exert  her  critical  activity, 
and  to  decide  how  far,  in  the  light  of  other  sciences  and  in 
that  of  general  philosophy,  such  beliefs  can  be  considered 
true. 

Dogmatically  to  decide  this  is  an  impossible  task.  Not 
only  are  the  other  sciences  and  the  philosophy  still  far  from 

^  Compare,  e.  g.,  the  quotation  from  Renan  on  p.  37,  above. 
^"Prayerful"  taken  in  the  broader  sense  explained  above  on  pp. 
453  ff- 


480       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

being  completed,  but  in  their  present  state  we  find  them  full 
of  conflicts.  The  sciences  of  nature  know  nothing  of  spir- 
itual presences,  and  on  the  whole  hold  no  practical  com- 
merce whatever  with  the  idealistic  conceptions  towards 
which  general  philosophy  inclines.  The  scientist,  so-called, 
is,  during  his  scientific  hours  at  least,  so  materialistic  that 
one  may  well  say  that  on  the  whole  the  influence  of  science 
goes  against  the  notion  that  religion  should  be  recognized 
at  all.  And  this  antipathy  to  religion  finds  an  echo  within 
the  very  science  of  religions  itself.  The  cultivator  of  this 
science  has  to  become  acquainted  with  so  many  groveling- 
and  horrible  superstitions  that  a  presumption  easily  arises 
in  his  mind  that  any  belief  that  is  religious  probably  is 
false.  In  the  "prayerful  communion"  of  savages  with  such 
mumbo-jumbos  of  deities  as  they  acknowledge,  it  is  hard 
for  us  to  see  what  genuine  spiritual  work — even  though  it 
were  work  relative  only  to  their  dark  savage  obligations — 
can  possibly  be  done. 

The  consequence  is  that  the  conclusions  of  the  science  of 
religions  are  as  likely  to  be  adverse  as  they  are  to  be  favor- 
able to  the  claim  that  the  essence  of  religion  is  true.  There 
is  a  notion  in  the  air  about  us  that  religion  is  probably  only 
an  anachronism,  a  case  of  "survival,"  an  atavistic  relapse 
into  a  mode  of  thought  which  humanity  in  its  more  enlight- 
ened examples  has  outgrown;  and  this  notion  our  religious 
anthropologists  at  present  do  little  to  counteract. 

This  view  is  so  widespread  at  the  present  day  that  I  must 
consider  it  with  some  explicitness  before  I  pass  to  my  own 
conclusions.  Let  me  call  it  the  "Survival  theory,"  for  brev- 
ity's sake. 

The  pivot  round  which  the  religious  life,  as  we  have 
traced  it,  revolves,  is  the  interest  of  the  individual  in  his 
private  personal  destiny.  Religion,  in  short,  is  a  monu- 
mental chapter  in  the  history  of  human  egotism.  The  gods 


CONCLUSIONS  481 

believed  in — whether  by  crude  savages  or  by  men  disciplined 
intellectually — agree  with  each  other  in  recognizing  per- 
sonal  calls.  Religious  thought  is  carried  on  in  terms  of  per- 
sonality, this  being,  in  the  world  of  religion,  the  one  funda- 
mental fact.  To-day,  quite  as  much  as  at  any  previous  age, 
the  religious  individual  tells  you  that  the  divine  meets  him 
on  the  basis  of  his  personal  concerns. 

Science,  on  the  other  hand,  has  ended  by  utterly  repudi- 
ating the  personal  point  of  view.  She  catalogues  her  ele- 
ments and  records  her  laws  indifferent  as  to  what  purpose 
may  be  shown  forth  by  them,  and  constructs  her  theories 
quite  careless  of  their  bearing  on  human  anxieties  and  fates. 
Though  the  scientist  may  individually  nourish  a  religion, 
and  be  a  theist  in  his  irresponsible  hours,  the  days  are  over 
when  it  could  be  said  that  for  Science  herself  the  heavens 
declare  the  glory  of  God  and  the  firmament  showeth  his 
handiwork.  Our  solar  system,  with  its  harmonies,  is  seen 
now  as  but  one  passing  case  of  a  certain  sort  of  moving 
equilibrium  in  the  heavens,  realized  by  a  local  accident  in 
an  appalling  wilderness  of  worlds  where  no  life  can  exist. 
In  a  span  of  time  which  as  a  cosmic  interval  will  count  but 
as  an  hour,  it  will  have  ceased  to  be.  The  Darwinian  notion 
of  chance  production,  and  subsequent  destruction,  speedy 
or  deferred,  applies  to  the  largest  as  well  as  to  the  smallest 
facts.  It  is  impossible,  in  the  present  temper  of  the  scientific 
imagination,  to  find  in  the  driftings  of  the  cosmic  atoms, 
whether  they  work  on  the  universal  or  on  the  particular 
scale,  anything  but  a  kind  of  aimless  weather,  doing  and 
undoing,  achieving  no  proper  history,  and  leaving  no  re- 
sult. Nature  has  no  one  distinguishable  ultimate  tendency 
with  which  it  is  possible  to  feel  a  sympathy.  In  the  vast 
rhythm  of  her  processes,  as  the  scientific  mind  now  follows 
them,  she  appears  to  cancel  herself.  The  books  of  natural 
theology  which  satisfied  the  intellects  of  our  grandfathers 


482       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

seem  to  us  quite  grotesque/  representing,  as  they  did,  a 

^  How  was  it  ever  conceivable,  we  ask,  that  a  man  like  Christian 
Wolff,  in  whose  dry-as-dust  head  all  the  learning  of  the  early  eigh- 
teenth century  was  concentrated,  should  have  preserved  such  a  baby- 
like faith  in  the  personal  and  human  character  of  Nature  as  to  ex- 
pound her  operadons  as  he  did  in  his  work  on  the  uses  of  natural 
things?  This,  for  example,  is  the  account  he  gives  of  the  sun  and  its 
utility: — 

"We  see  that  God  has  created  die  sun  to  keep  the  changeable  con- 
ditions on  the  earth  in  such  an  order  that  living  creatures,  men  and 
beasts,  may  inhabit  its  surface.  Since  men  are  the  most  reasonable  of 
creatures,  and  able  to  infer  God's  invisible  being  from  the  contem- 
plation of  the  world,  the  sun  in  so  far  forth  contributes  to  the  pri- 
mary purpose  of  creation:  without  it  the  race  of  man  could  not  be 
preserved  or  continued.  .  .  .  The  sun  makes  daylight,  not  only  on 
our  earth,  but  also  on  the  other  planets;  and  daylight  is  of  the  utmost 
utility  to  us;  for  by  its  means  we  can  commodiously  carry  on  those 
occupations  which  in  the  night-time  would  either  be  quite  impossible, 
or  at  any  rate  impossible  without  our  going  to  the  expense  of  artificial 
light.  The  beasts  of  the  field  can  find  food  by  day  which  they  would 
not  be  able  to  find  at  night.  Moreover  we  owe  it  to  the  sunlight  that 
we  are  able  to  see  everything  that  is  on  the  earth's  surface,  not  only 
near  by,  but  also  at  a  distance,  and  to  recognize  both  near  and  far 
things  according  to  their  species,  which  again  is  of  manifold  use  to 
us  not  only  in  the  business  necessary  to  human  life,  and  when  we  are 
traveling,  but  also  for  the  scientific  knowledge  of  Nature,  which 
knowledge  for  the  most  part  depends  on  observations  made  with 
the  help  of  sight,  and,  without  the  sunshine,  would  have  been  impos- 
sible. If  any  one  would  righdy  impress  on  his  mind  the  great  advan- 
tages which  he  derives  from  the  sun,  let  him  imagine  himself  living 
through  only  one  month,  and  see  how  it  would  be  with  all  his  under- 
takings, if  it  were  not  day  but  night.  He  would  then  be  sufficiently 
convinced  out  of  his  own  experience,  especially  if  he  had  much  work 
to  carry  on  in  the  street  or  in  the  fields.  .  .  .  From  the  sun  we  learn 
to  recognize  when  it  is  midday,  and  by  knowing  this  point  of  time 
exacdy,  we  can  set  our  clocks  right,  on  which  account  astronomy 
owes  much  to  the  sun.  ...  By  help  of  the  sun  one  can  find  the  mer- 
idian. .  .  .  But  the  meridian  is  the  basis  of  our  sun-dials,  and  gener- 
ally speaking,  we  should  have  no  sun-dials  if  we  had  no  sun."  Ver- 
niinftige  Gedanken  von  den  Absichter  der  natiirhchen  Dinge,  1782, 

pp.  74-84.  „    ,        r-  .....  c  ".U 

Oi  read  the  account  of  God  s  beneficence  m  the  institution  ot    the 


CONCLUSIONS  483 

God  who  conformed  the  largest  things  of  nature  to  the 
paltriest  of  our  private  wants.  The  God  whom  science  rec- 

great  variety  throughout  tlie  world  of  men's  faces,  voices,  and  hand- 
writing," given  in  Derham's  Physico-theology,  a  book  that  had  much 
vogue  in  the  eighteenth  century.  "Had  Man's  body,"  says  Dr.  Der- 
ham,  "been  made  according  to  any  of  the  Atheistical  Schemes,  or  any 
other  Method  than  that  of  the  infinite  Lord  of  the  World,  this  wise 
Variety  would  never  have  been:  but  Men's  Faces  would  have  been 
cast  in  the  same,  or  not  a  very  different  Mould,  their  Organs  of 
Speech  would  have  sounded  the  same  or  not  so  great  a  Variety  of 
Notes;  and  the  same  Structure  of  Muscles  and  Nerves  would  have 
given  the  Hand  the  same  Direcdon  in  Writing.  And  in  this  Case, 
what  Confusion,  what  Disturbance,  what  Mischiefs  would  the  world 
eternally  have  lain  under!  No  Security  could  have  been  to  our  per- 
.sons;  no  Certainty,  no  Enjoyment  of  our  Possessions;  no  Jusdce  be- 
tween Man  and  Man;  no  Disdncdon  between  Good  and  Bad,  be- 
tween Friends  and  Foes,  between  Father  and  Child,  Husband  and 
Wife,  Male  or  Female;  but  all  would  have  been  turned  topsy-turvy,  by 
being  exposed  to  the  Malice  of  the  Envious  and  ill-Natured,  to  the 
Fraud  and  Violence  of  Knaves  and  Robbers,  to  the  Forgeries  of  the 
crafty  Cheat,  to  the  Lusts  of  the  Effeminate  and  Debauched,  and  whaj 
not!  Our  Courts  of  Jusdce  can  abundandy  tesdfy  the  dire  Effects  of 
Mistaking  Men's  Faces,  of  counterfeidng  their  Hands,  and  forging 
Writings.  But  now  as  the  infinitely  wise  Creator  and  Ruler  hath  or- 
dered the  Matter,  every  man's  Face  can  distinguish  him  in  the  Light, 
and  his  Voice  in  die  Dark;  his  Hand-writing  can  speak  for  him 
though  absent,  and  be  his  Witness,  and  secure  his  Contracts  in  fu- 
ture Generations.  A  manifest  as  well  as  admirable  Indication  of  the 
divine  Superintendence  and  Management."  ,  ^t 

A  God  so  careful  as  to  make  provision  even  for  the  unmistakable  )  ) 
signing  of  bank  checks  and  deeds  was  a  deity  truly  after  the  heart  of  ,  [ 
eighteenth  century  Anglicanism. 

I  subjoin,  omitting  the  capitals,  Derham's  "Vindication  of  God  by 
the  Instimtion  of  Hills  and  Valleys,"  and  Wolff's  altogether  cuUnary 
account  of  the  institution  of  Water: — 

"The  uses,"  says  Wolff,  "which  water  serves  in  human  life  are  plain 
to  see  and  need  not  be  described  at  length.  Water  is  a  universal  drink 
of  man  and  beasts.  Even  though  men  have  made  themselves  drinks 
that  are  artificial,  they  could  not  do  this  without  water.  Beer  is 
brewed  of  water  and  malt,  and  it  is  the  water  in  it  which  quenches 
thirst.  Wine  is  prepared  from  grapes,  which  could  never  have  grown 
without  the  help  of  water;  and  the  same  is  true  of  those  drinks  which 


484       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

ognizes  must  be  a  God  of  universal  laws  exclusively,  a  God 
who  does  a  wholesale,  not  a  retail  business.  He  cannot  ac- 

in  England  and  other  places  they  produce  from  fruit.  .  .  .  There- 
fore since  God  so  planned  the  world  that  men  and  beasts  should 
live  upon  it  and  find  thefe  everything  required  for  their  necessity  and 
convenience,  he  also  made  water  as  one  means  whereby  to  make  the 
earth  into  so  excellent  a  dwelling.  And  this  is  all  the  more  manifest 
when  we  consider  the  advantages  which  we  obtain  from  this  same 
water  for  the  cleaning  of  our  household  utensils,  of  our  clothing,  and 
of  other  matters.  .  .  .  When  one  goes  into  a  grinding-mill  one  sees 
that  the  grindstone  must  always  be  kept  wet  and  then  one  will  get  a 
still  greater  idea  of  the  use  of  water." 

Of  the  hills  and  valleys,  Derham,  after  praising  their  beauty,  lis- 
courses  as  follows:  "Some  constitutions  are  indeed  of  so  happy  a 
strength,  and  so  confirmed  an  health,  as  to  be  indifferent  to  almost 
any  place  or  temperature  of  the  air.  But  then  others  are  so  weakly  and 
feeble,  as  not  to  be  able  to  bear  one,  but  can  live  comfortably  in  an- 
other place.  With  some  the  more  subde  and  finer  air  of  the  hills  doth 
oest  agree,  who  are  languishing  and  dying  in  the  feculent  and  gross- 
er air  of  great  towns,  or  even  the  warmer  and  vaporous  air  of  the  val- 
'eys  and  waters.  But  contrariwise,  others  languish  on  the  hills,  and 
^ow  lusty  and  strong  in  the  warmer  air  of  the  valleys. 

"So  that  this  opportunity  of  shifdng  our  abode  from  the  hills  to 
the  vales,  is  an  admirable  easement,  refreshment,  and  great  benefit  to 
the  valetudinarian,  feeble  part  of  mankind;  affording  those  an  easy 
and  comfortable  life,  who  would  otherwise  live  miserably,  languish, 
^nd  pine  away. 

"To  this  salutary  conformation  of  the  earth  we  may  add  another 
great  convenience  of  the  hills,  and  that  is  affording  commodious 
places  for  habitation,  serving  (as  an  eminent  author  wordeth  it)  as 
screens  to  keep  off  the  cold  and  nipping  blasts  of  the  northern  and 
easterly  winds,  and  reflecting  the  benign  and  cherishing  sunbeams, 
and  so  rendering  our  habitations  both  more  comfortable  and  more 
cheerly  in  winter. 

"Lastiy,  it  is  to  the  hills  that  the  fountains  owe  their  rise  and  the 
rivers  their  conveyance,  and  consequently  those  vast  masses  and 
lofty  piles  are  not,  as  they  are  charged,  such  rude  and  useless  excres- 
cences of  our  ill-formed  globe;  but  the  admirable  tools  of  nature, 
contrived  and  ordered  by  the  infinite  Creator,  to  do  one  of  its  most 
useful  works.  For,  was  the  surface  of  the  earth  even  and  level,  and 
the  middle  parts  of  its  islands  and  continents  not  mountainous  and 
high  as  now  it  is,  it  is  most  certain  there  could  be  no  descent  for  the 


CONCLUSIONS  485 

commodate  his  processes  to  the  convenience  of  individuals. 
The  bubbles  on  the  foam  which  coats  a  stormy  sea  are  floating 
episodes,  made  and  unmade  by  the  forces  of  the  wind  and 
water.  Our  private  selves  are  like  those  bubbles — epiphe- 
nomena,  as  Chfford,  I  believe,  ingeniously  called  them; 
their  destinies  weigh  nothing  and  determine  nothing  in  the 
world's  irremediable  currents  of  events. 

You  see  how  natural  it  is,  from  this  point  of  view,  to  treat 
religion  as  a  mere  survival,  for  religion  does  in  fact  perpetu- 
ate the  traditions  of  the  most  primeval  thought.  To  coerce 
the  spiritual  powers,  or  to  square  them  and  get  them  on 
our  side,  was,  during  enormous  tracts  of  time,  the  one  great 
object  in  our  dealings  with  the  natural  world.  For  our  an- 
cestors, dreams,  hallucinations,  revelations,  and  cock-and- 
bull  stories  were  inextricably  mixed  with  facts.  Up  to  a 
comparatively  recent  date  such  distinctions  as  those  between 
what  has  been  verified  and  what  is  only  conjectured,  be- 
tween the  impersonal  and  the  personal  aspects  of  existence, 
were  hardly  suspected  or  conceived.  Whatever  you  imagined 
in  a  lively  manner,  whatever  you  thought  fit  to  be  true,  you 
affirmed  confidently;  and  whatever  you  affirmed,  your  com- 
rades believed.  Truth  was  what  had  not  yet  been  contra- 
dicted, most  things  were  taken  into  the  mind  from  the 
point  of  view  of  their  human  suggestiveness,  and  the  atten- 
tion confined  itself  exclusively  to  the  aesthetic  and  dramatic 
aspects  of  events.^ 

rivers,  no  conveyance  for  the  waters;  but,  instead  of  gliding  along 
those  gentle  declivities  which  the  higher  lands  now  afford  them  quite 
down  to  the  sea,  they  would  stagnate  and  perhaps  stink,  and  also 
drown  large  tracts  of  land. 

"  [Thus]  the  hills  and  vales,  though  to  a  peevish  and  weary  traveler 
they  may  seem  incommodious  and  troublesome,  yet  are  a  noble  work 
of  the  great  Creator,  and  wisely  appointed  by  him  for  the  good  of 
our  sublunary  world." 

"  Until  the  seventeenth  century  this  mode  of  thought  prevailed. 
One  need  only  recall  the  dramatic  treatment  even  of  mechanical 


486      THE  VARIETIES  OF   RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

How  indeed  could  it  be  otherwise?  The  extraordinary 
value,  for  explanation  and  prevision,  of  those  mathemati- 

questions  by  Aristotle,  as,  for  example,  his  explanation  of  the  power 
of  the  lever  to  make  a  small  weight  raise  a  larger  one.  This  is  due, 
according  to  Aristode,  to  the  generally  miraculous  character  of  the 
circle  and  of  all  circular  movement.  The  circle  is  bodi  convex  and 
concave;  it  is  made  by  a  fixed  point  and  a  moving  line,  which  con- 
tradict each  other;  and  whatever  moves  in  a  circle  moves  in  opposite 
directions.  Nevertheless,  movement  in  a  circle  is  the  most  "natural" 
movement;  and  the  long  arm  of  the  lever,  moving,  as  it  does,  in  the 
larger  circle,  has  the  greater  amount  of  this  natural  modon,  and  con- 
sequently requires  the  lesser  force.  Or  recall  the  explanation  by  Her- 
odotus of  the  position  of  the  sun  in  winter:  It  moves  to  the  south  be- 
cause of  the  cold  which  drives  it  into  the  warm  parts  of  the  heavens 
over  Libya.  Or  listen  to  Saint  Augustine's  speculations:  "Who  gave 
to  chaff  such  power  to  freeze  that  it  preserves  snow  buried  under  it, 
and  such  power  to  warm  that  it  ripens  green  fruit?  Who  can  ex- 
plain the  strange  properties  of  fire  itself,  which  blackens  all  that  it 
burns,  though  itself  bright,  and  which,  though  of  the  most  beautiful 
colors,  discolors  almost  all  that  it  touches  and  feeds  upon,  and  turns 
blazing  fuel  into  grimy  cinders?  ...  Then  what  wonderful  prop- 
erties do  we  find  in  charcoal,  which  is  so  brittle  that  a  light  tap 
breaks  it,  and  a  slight  pressure  pulverizes  it,  and  yet  is  so  strong  that 
no  moisture  rots  it,  nor  any  time  causes  it  to  decay."  City  of  God, 
book  xxi,  ch.  iv. 

Such  aspects  of  things  as  these,  their  naturalness  and  unnaturalness, 
the  sympathies  and  antipathies  of  their  superficial  qualities,  their 
eccentricities,  their  brightness  and  strength  and  destructiveness,  were 
inevitably  the  ways  in  which  they  originally  fastened  our  attention. 

If  you  open  early  medical  books,  you  will  find  sympathetic  magic 
invoked  on  every  page.  Take,  for  example,  the  famous  vulnerary 
ointment  attributed  to  Paracelsus.  For  this  there  were  a  variety  of  re- 
ceipts, including  usually  human  fat,  the  fat  of  either  a  bull,  a  wild 
boar,  or  a  bear;  powdered  earthworms,  the  tisnia,  or  mossy  growth 
on  the  weathered  skull  of  a  hanged  criminal,  and  other  materials 
equally  unpleasant — the  whole  prepared  under  the  planet  Venus  if 
possible,  but  never  under  Mars  or  Saturn.  Then,  if  a  splinter  of  wood, 
dipped  in  the  patient's  blood,  or  the  bloodstained  weapon  that 
wounded  him,  be  immersed  in  this  ointment,  the  wound  itself  being 
tighdy  bound  up,  the  latter  infallibly  gets  well — I  quote  now  Van 
Helmont's  account — for  the  blood  on  the  weapon  or  splinter,  con- 
taining in  it  the  spirit  of  the  wounded  man,  is  roused  to  active  excite- 


CONCLUSIONS  487 

cal  and  mechanical  modes  of  conception  which  science  uses, 
was  a  result  that  could  not  possibly  have  been  expected  in 

ment  by  the  contact  of  the  ointment,  whence  there  results  to  it  a  full 
commission  or  power  to  cure  its  cousin-german,  the  blood  in  the  pa- 
tient's body.  This  it  does  by  sucking  out  the  dolorous  and  exotic  im- 
pression from  the  wounded  part.  But  to  do  this  it  has  to  implore  the 
aid  of  the  bull's  fat,  and  other  portions  of  the  unguent.  The  reason 
why  bull's  fat  is  so  powerful  is  that  the  bull  at  the  time  of  slaughter  is 
full  of  secret  reluctancy  and  vindictive  murmurs,  and  therefore  dies 
with  a  higher  flame  of  revenge  about  him  than  any  other  animal. 
And  thus  we  have  made  it  out,  says  this  author,  that  the  admirable 
efficacy  of  the  ointment  ought  to  be  imputed,  not  to  any  auxiliary  con- 
currence of  Satan,  but  simply  to  the  energy  of  the  posthumous  char- 
acter of  Revenge  remaining  firmly  impressed  upon  the  blood  and 
concreted  fat  in  the  unguent.  J.  B.  Van  Helmont:  A  Ternary  of  Par- 
adoxes, translated  by  Walter  Charleton,  London,  1650. — I  much 
abridge  the  original  in  my  citations. 

The  author  goes  on  to  prove  by  die  analogy  of  many  other  nat- 
ural facts  that  diis  sympathedc  action  between  things  at  a  distance 
is  the  true  rationale  of  the  case.  "If,"  he  says,  "the  heart  of  a  horse, 
slain  by  a  witch,  taken  out  of  the  yet  reeking  carcase,  be  impaled 
upon  an  arrow  and  roasted,  immediately  the  whole  witch  becomes 
tormented  with  the  insufferable  pains  and  cruelty  of  the  fire,  which 
could  by  no  means  happen  unless  there  preceded  a  conjuncdon  of 
the  spirit  of  the  witch  with  the  spirit  of  the  horse.  In  the  reeking 
and  yet  panting  heart,  the  spirit  of  the  witch  is  kept  captive,  and 
the  retreat  of  it  prevented  by  the  arrow  transfixed.  Similarly  hath 
not  many  a  murdered  carcase  at  the  coroner's  inquest  suffered  a 
fresh  hemorrhage  or  cruentation  at  the  presence  of  the  assassin? — 
the  blood  being,  as  in  a  furious  fit  of  anger,  enraged  and  agitated 
by  the  impress  of  revenge  conceived  against  the  murderer,  at  the  in- 
stant of  the  soul's  compulsive  exile  from  the  body.  So,  if  you  have 
dropsy,  gout,  or  jaundice,  by  including  some  of  your  warm  blood  in 
the  shell  and  white  of  an  egg,  which,  exposed  to  a  gentle  heat,  and 
mixed  with  a  bait  of  flesh,  you  shall  give  to  a  hungry  dog  or  hog, 
the  disease  shall  instantly  pass  from  you  into  the  animal,  and  leave 
you  entirely.  And  similarly  again,  if  you  burn  some  of  the  milk 
either  of  a  cow  or  of  a  woman,  the  gland  from  which  it  issued  will 
dry  up.  A  gendeman  at  Brussels  had  his  nose  mowed  off  in  a  com- 
bat, but  the  celebrated  surgeon  Tagliacozzus  digged  a  new  nose  for 
him  out  of  the  skin  of  the  arm  of  a  porter  at  Bologna.  About  thir- 
teen  months  after  his  return  to  his  own  country,  die  engrafted  nose 


/^SS       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

advance.  Weight,  movement,  velocity,  direction,  position, 
what  thin,  palhd,  uninteresting  ideas!  How  could  the  richer 
animistic  aspects  of  Nature,  the  peculiarities  and  oddities 
that  make  phenomena  picturesquely  striking  or  expressive, 
fail  to  have  been  first  singled  out  and  followed  by  philos- 
ophy as  the  more  promising  avenue  to  the  knowledge  of 
Nature's  life?  Well,  it  is  still  in  these  richer  animistic  and 
dramatic  aspects  that  religion  delights  to  dwell.  It  is  the 
terror  and  beauty  of  phenomena,  the  "promise"  of  the  dawn 
and  of  the  rainbow,  the  "voice"  of  the  thunder,  the  "gentle- 
ness" of  the  summer  rain,  the  "sublimity"  of  the  stars,  and 
not  the  physical  laws  which  these  things  follow,  by  which 
the  religious  mind  still  continues  to  be  most  impressed;  and 
just  as  of  yore,  the  devout  man  tells  you  that  in  the  solitude 
of  his  room  or  of  the  fields  he  still  feels  the  divine  presence, 
that  inflowings  of  help  come  in  reply  to  his  prayers,  and 
that  sacrifices  to  this  unseen  reality  fill  him  with  security 
and  peace. 

Pure  anachronism!  says  the  survival-theory; — anachron- 
ism for  which  deanthropomorphization  of  the  imagination 
is  the  remedy  required.  The  less  we  mix  the  private  with 
the  cosmic,  the  more  we  dwell  in  universal  and  impersonal 
terms,  the  truer  heirs  of  Science  we  become. 

In  spite  of  the  appeal  which  this  impersonality  of  the 
scientific  attitude  makes  to  a  certain  magnanimity  of  tem- 
per, I  believe  it  to  be  shallow,  and  I  can  now  state  my  rea- 
son in  comparatively  few  words.  That  reason  is  that,  so  long 
as  we  deal  with  the  cosmic  and  the  general,  we  deal  only 

grew  cold,  putrefied,  and  in  a  few  days  dropped  off,  and  it  was  then 
discovered  that  the  porter  had  expired,  near  about  the  same  puncdiio 
of  dme.  There  are  still  at  Brussels  eye-witnesses  of  this  occurrence," 
says  Van  Helmont;  and  adds,  "I  pray  what  is  there  in  this  of  super- 
stidon  or  of  exalted  imagination?" 

Modern  mind-cure  literature — the  works  of  Prendce  Mulford,  for 
example — is  full  of  sympathetic  magic. 


CONCLUSIONS  489 

with  the  symbols  of  reahty,  but  as  soon  as  we  deal  with  pri- 
vate and  personal  phenomena  as  such,  we  deal  with  realities    \ 
in  the  completest  sense  of  the  term.  I  think  I  can  easily     / 
make  clear  what  I  mean  by  these  words. 

The  world  of  our  experience  consists  at  all  times  of  two 
parts,  an  objective  and  a  subjective  part,  of  which  the  for- 
mer may  be  incalculably  more  extensive  than  the  latter,  and 
yet  the  latter  can  never  be  omitted  or  suppressed.  The  ob- 
jective part  is  the  sum  total  of  whatsoever  at  any  given  time 
we  may  be  thinking  of,  the  subjective  part  is  the  inner 
"state"  in  which  the  thinking  comes  to  pass.  What  we  think 
of  may  be  enormous — the  cosmic  times  and  spaces,  for  ex- 
ample— whereas  the  inner  state  may  be  the  most  fugitive 
and  paltry  activity  of  mind.  Yet  the  cosmic  objects,  so  far 
as  the  experience  yields  them,  are  but  ideal  pictures  of  some- 
thing whose  existence  we  do  not  inwardly  possess  but  only 
point  at  outwardly,  while  the  inner  state  is  our  very  experi- 
ence itself;  its  reality  and  that  of  our  experience  are  one. 
A  conscious  field  plus  its  object  as  felt  or  thought  of  plus 
an  attitude  towards  the  object  plus  the  sense  of  a  self  to 
whom  the  attitude  belongs — such  a  concrete  bit  of  personal 
experience  may  be  a  small  bit,  but  it  is  a  solid  bit  as  long 
as  it  lasts;  not  hollow,  not  a  mere  abstract  element  of  ex- 
perience, such  as  the  "object"  is  when  taken  all  alone.  It  is 
a  full  fact,  even  though  it  be  an  insignificant  fact;  it  is  of 
the  kind  to  which  all  realities  whatsoever  must  belong;  the 
motor  currents  of  the  world  run  through  the  like  of  it;  it  is 
on  the  line  connecting  real  events  with  real  events.  That  un- 
sharable  feeling  which  each  one  of  us  has  of  the  pinch  of 
his  individual  destiny  as  he  privately  feels  it  rolHng  out  on 
fortune's  wheel  may  be  disparaged  for  its  egotism,  may  be 
sneered  at  as  unscientific,  but  it  is  the  one  thing  that  fills  up 
the  measure  of  our  concrete  actuality,  and  any  'vould-be 


490       THE   VARIETIES    OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

existenl  that  should  lack  such  a  feeling,  or  its  analogue, 
would  be  a  piece  of  reality  only  half  made  up.^ 

If  this  be  true,  it  is  absurd  for  science  to  say  that  the 
egotistic  elements  of  experience  should  be  suppressed.  The 
axis  of  reality  runs  solely  through  the  egotistic  places — they 
are  strung  upon  it  like  so  many  beads.  To  describe  the 
world  with  all  the  various  feelings  of  the  individual  pinch 
of  destiny,  all  the  various  spiritual  attitudes,  left  out  from 
the  description — they  being  as  describable  as  anything  else 
— would  be  something  like  offering  a  printed  bill  of  fare  as 
the  equivalent  for  a  solid  meal.  Religion  makes  no  such 
blunder.  The  individual's  religion  may  be  egotistic,  and 
those  private  realities  which  it  keeps  in  touch  with  may  be 
narrow  enough;  but  at  any  rate  it  always  remains  infinitely 
less  hollow  and  abstract,  as  far  as  it  goes,  than  a  science 
which  prides  itself  on  taking  no  account  of  anything  private 
at  all. 

A  bill  of  fare  with  one  real  raisin  on  it  instead  of  the 
word  "raisin,"  with  one  real  egg  instead  of  the  word  "egg" 
might  be  an  inadequate  meal,  but  it  would  at  least  be  a 
commencement  of  reality.  The  contention  of  the  survival- 
theory  that  we  ought  to  stick  to  non-personal  elements  ex- 
clusively seems  like  saying  that  we  ought  to  be  satisfied  for- 
ever with  reading  the  naked  bill  of  fare.  I  think,  therefore, 
that  however  particular  questions  connected  with  our  in- 
dividual destinies  may  be  answered,  it  is  only  by  acknowl- 
edging them  as  genuine  questions,  and  living  in  the  sphere 
of  thought  which  they  open  up,  that  we  become  profound. 
But  to  live  thus  is  to  be  religious;  so  I  unhesitatingly  repu- 
diate the  survival-theory  of  religion,  as  being  founded  on  an 
egregious  mistake.  It  does  not  follow,  because  our  ancestors 

^  Compare  Lotze's  doctrine  that  the  only  meaning  we  can  attach  to 
the  notion  of  a  thing  as  it  is  "in  itself"  is  by  conceiving  it  as  it  is  /o;- 
itself;  i.  e.,  as  a  piece  of  full  experience  with  a  private  sense  of 
'pinch"  or  inner  activity  of  some  sort  going  witli  it. 


CONCLUSIONS  491 

made  so  many  errors  of  fact  and  mixed  them  with  their  j 
rehgion,  that  we  should  therefore  leave  off  being  religious  ■. 
at  all.^  By  being  religious  we  establish  ourselves  in  posses- 
sion of  ultimate  reality  at  the  only  points  at  which  reaUty 

^  Even  the  errors  of  fact  may  possibly  turn  out  not  to  be  as  whole- 
sale as  the  scientist  assumes.  We  saw  in  Lecture  IV  how  the  reli. 
gious  conception  of  the  universe  seems  to  many  mind-curers  "veri- 
fied" from  day  to  day  by  their  experience  of  fact.  "Experience  of  "■ 
fact"  is  a  field  with  so  many  things  in  it  that  the  sectarian  scientist, 
methodically  declining,  as  he  does,  to  recognize  such  "facts"  as 
mind-curers  and  others  like  them  experience,  otherwise  than  by  such 
rude  heads  of  classification  as  "bosh,"  "rot,"  "folly,"  certainly  leaves 
out  a  mass  of  raw  fact  which,  save  for  the  industrious  interest  of  the 
rehgious  in  the  more  personal  aspects  of  reality,  would  never  have 
succeeded  in  getting  itself  recorded  at  all.  We  know  this  to  be  true 
already  in  certain  cases;  it  may,  therefore,  be  true  in  others  as  well. 
Miraculous  healings  have  always  been  part  of  the  supernaturalist 
stock  in  trade,  and  have  always  been  dismissed  by  the  scientist  as  fig- 
ments of  the  imagination.  But  the  scientist's  tardy  education  in  the 
facts  of  hypnotism  has  recently  given  him  an  apperceiving  mass  for 
phenomena  of  this  order,  and  he  consequently  now  allows  that  the 
healings  may  exist,  provided  you  expressly  call  them  effects  of  "sug- 
gestion." Even  the  stigmata  of  the  cross  on  Saint  Francis's  hands  and 
feet  may  on  these  terms  not  be  a  fable.  Similarly,  the  time-honored 
phenomenon  of  diabolical  possession  is  on  the  point  of  being  ad- 
mitted by  the  scientist  as  a  fact,  now  that  he  has  the  name  of  "hystero-^ 
demonopathy"  by  which  to  apperceive  it.  No  one  can  foresee  just 
how  far  this  legitimation  of  occultist  phenomena  under  newly  found 
scientist  titles  may  proceed — even  "prophecy,"  even  "levitation," 
might  creep  into  the  pale. 

Thus  the  divorce  between  scientist  facts  and  religious  facts  may  not 
necessarily  be  as  eternal  as  it  at  first  sight  seems,  nor  the  personalism 
and  romanticism  of  the  world,  as  they  appeared  to  primitive  think- 
ing, be  matters  so  irrevocably  outgrown.  The  final  human  opinion 
may,  in  short,  in  some  manner  now  impossible  to  foresee,  revert  to 
the  more  personal  style,  just  as  any  path  of  progress  may  follow  a 
spiral  rather  than  a  straight  line.  If  this  were  so,  the  rigorously  im- 
personal view  of  science  might  one  day  appear  as  having  been  a  tem- 
porarily useful  eccentricity  rather  than  the  definitively  triumphant 
position  which  the  sectarian  scientist  at  present  so  confidendy  an 
nounces  it  to  be. 


492       THE   VARIETIES   OF    RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

is  given  us  to  guard.  Our  responsible  concern  is  with  our 
private  destiny,  after  all. 

You  see  now  why  I  have  been  so  individualistic  through- 
out these  lectures,  and  why  I  have  seemed  so  bent  on  re- 
habilitating the  element  of  feeling  in  religion  and  subordi- 
nating its  intellectual  part.  Individuality  is  founded  in  feel- 
ing; and  the  recesses  of  feeling,  the  darker,  blinder  strata  of 
character,  are  the  only  places  in  the  world  in  which  we 
catch  real  fact  in  the  making,  and  directly  perceive  how 
events  happen,  and  how  work  is  actually  done.^  Compared 
with  this  world  of  living  individualized  feelings,  the  world 
of  generalized  objects  which  the  intellect  contemplates  is 
without  solidity  or  life.  As  in  stereoscopic  or  kinctoscopic 
pictures  seen  outside  the  instrument,  the  third  dimension, 
the  movement,  the  vital  element,  are  not  there.  We  get  a 
beautiful  picture  of  an  express  train  supposed  to  be  moving, 
but  where  in  the  picture,  as  I  have  heard  a  friend  say,  is 
the  energy  or  the  fifty  miles  an  hour.f"  " 

^  Hume's  criticism  has  banished  causation  from  the  world  of  phy- 
lical  objects,  and  "Science"  is  absolutely  satisfied  to  define  cause  in 
terms  of  concomitant  change — read  Mach,  Pearson,  Ostwald.  The 
"original"  of  the  notion  of  causation  is  in  our  inner  personal  exper- 
ience, and  only  there  can  causes  in  the  old-fashioned  sense  be  directly 
observed  and  described. 

-  When  I  read  in  a  religious  paper  words  like  these:  "Perhaps  the 
best  thing  we  can  say  of  God  is  that  he  is  the  Inevitable  Inference,"  I 
recognize  the  tendency  to  let  religion  evaporate  in  intellectual  terms. 
Would  martyrs  have  sung  in  the  flames  for  a  mere  inference,  how- 
ever inevitable  it  might  be?  Original  religious  men,  like  Saint  Fran- 
cis, Luther,  Behmen,  have  usually  been  enemies  of  the  intellect's  pre- 
tension to  meddle  with  religious  things.  Yet  the  intellect,  everywhere 
invasive,  shows  everywhere  its  shallowing  effect.  See  how  the  an- 
cient spirit  of  Methodism  evaporates  under  those  wonderfully  able 
rationalistic  booklets  (which  every  one  should  read)  of  a  philosopher 
like  Professor  Bowne  (The  Christian  Revelation,  The  Chrisdan  Life, 
The  Atonement:  Cincinnad  and  New  York,  1898,  1899,  1900).  See 
the  posidvely  expulsive  purpose  of  philosophy  properly  so  called: — 

"Religion,"  writes  M.  Vacherot  (La  Religion,  Paris,  1869,  pp.  313, 


CONCLUSIONS  -  493 

Let  us  agree,  then,  that  Rehgion,  occupying  herself  with 
personal  destinies  and  keeping  thus  in  contact  with  the  only 
absolute  realities  which  we  know,  must  necessarily  play  an 
eternal  part  in  human  history.  The  next  thing  to  decide  is 
what  she  reveals  about  those  destinies,  or  whether  indeed 
she  reveals  anything  distinct  enough  to  be  considered  a  gen- 
eral message  to  mankind.  We  have  done  as  you  see,  with 
our  preliminaries,  and  our  final  summing  up  can  now 
begin. 

I  am  well  aware  that  after  all  the  palpitating  documents 
which  I  have  quoted,  and  all  the  perspectives  of  emotion- 
inspiring  institution  and  belief  that  my  previous  lectures 
have  opened,  the  dry  analysis  to  which  I  now  advance  may 
appear  to  many  of  you  like  an  anti-climax,  a  tapering-o£( 

436,  et  passim),  "answers  to  a  transient  state  or  condition,  not  to  a 
permanent  determination  of  human  nature,  being  merely  an  expres- 
sion of  that  stage  of  the  human  mind  which  is  dominated  by  the 
imagination.  .  .  .  Christianity  has  but  a  single  possible  final  heir  to 
its  estate,  and  that  is  sciendfic  philosophy." 

In  a  sdll  more  radical  vein,  Professor  Ribot  (Psychologic  des  Senti- 
ments, p.  310)  describes  the  evaporadon  of  religion.  He  sums  it  up  in 
a  single  formula — the  ever-growing  predominance  of  the  rational  in- 
tellectual element,  with  the  gradual  fading  out  of  the  emodonal  ele- 
ment, diis  latter  tending  to  enter  into  the  group  of  purely  intellectual 
sentiments.  "Of  religious  sentiment  properly  so  called,  nothing  sur- 
vives at  last  save  a  vague  respect  for  the  unknowable  x  which  is  a 
last  relic  of  the  fear,  and  a  certain  attraction  towards  the  ideal,  which 
is  a  relic  of  the  love,  that  characterized  the  earlier  periods  of  reli- 
gious growth.  To  state  this  more  simply,  religion  tends  to  turn  into 
religious  philosophy. — These  are  psychologically  entirely  different 
things,  the  one  being  a  theoretic  construction  of  ratiocination,  where- 
as the  other  is  the  living  work  of  a  group  of  persons,  or  of  a  great 
inspired  leader,  calling  into  play  the  entire  thinking  and  feeling  or- 
ganism of  man." 

I  find  the  same  failure  to  recognize  that  the  stronghold  of  religion 
lies  in  individuaUty  in  attempts  like  those  of  Professor  Baldwin  (Men- 
tal Development,  Social  and  Ethical  Interpretations,  ch.  x)  and  Mr. 
H.  R.  Marshall  (Instinct  and  Reason,  chaps,  viii.  to  xii.)  to  make  it  ? 
purely  "conservative  social  force." 


494       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

and  flattening  out  of  the  subject,  instead  of  a  crescendo  of 
interest  and  result.  I  said  awhile  ago  that  the  religious  atti- 
tude of  Protestants  appears  poverty-stricken  to  the  Catholic 
imagination.  Still  more  poverty-stricken,  I  fear,  may  my 
final  summing  up  of  the  subject  appear  at  first  to  some  of 
you.  On  which  account  I  pray  you  now  to  bear  this  point 
in  mind,  that  in  the  present  part  of  it  I  am  expressly  trying 
to  reduce  religion  to  its  lowest  admissible  terms,  to  that 
minimum,  free  from  individualistic  excrescences,  which  all 
religions  contain  as  their  nucleus,  and  on  which  it  may  be 
hoped  that  all  religious  persons  may  agree.  That  established, 
we  should  have  a  result  which  might  be  small,  but  would 
at  least  be  solid;  and  on  it  and  round  it  the  ruddier  addi- 
tional beliefs  on  which  the  different  individuals  make  their 
venture  might  be  grafted,  and  flourish  as  richly  as  you 
please.  I  shall  add  my  own  over-belief  (which  will  be,  I  con- 
fess, of  a  somewhat  pallid  kind,  as  befits  a  critical  philos- 
opher), and  you  will,  I  hope,  also  add  your  over-beliefs,  and 
we  shall  soon  be  in  the  varied  world  of  concrete  religious 
constructions  once  more.  For  the  moment,  let  me  dryly 
pursue  the  analytic  part  of  the  task. 

Both  thought  and  feeling  are  determinants  of  conduct, 
and  the  same  conduct  may  be  determined  either  by  feeling 
or  by  thought.  When  we  survey  the  whole  field  of  religion, 
we  find  a  great  variety  in  the  thoughts  that  have  prevailed 
there;  but  the  feelings  on  the  one  hand  and  the  conduct  on 
the  other  are  almost  always  the  same,  for  Stoic,  Christian, 
and  Buddhist  saints  are  practically  indistinguishable  in  their 
lives.  The  theories  which  Religion  generates,  being  thus 
variable,  are  secondary;  and  if  you  wish  to  grasp  her 
essence,  you  must  look  to  the  feelings  and  the  conduct  as 
being  the  more  constant  elements.  It  is  between  these  two 
elements  that  the  short  circuit  exists  on  which  she  carries  on 
her  principal  business,  while  the  ideas  and  symbols  and 
other  institutions  form  loop-lines  which  may  be  perfections 


CONCLUSIONS  495 

and  improvements,  and  may  even  some  day  all  be  united 
into  one  harmonious  system,  but  which  are  not  to  be  re- 
garded as  organs  with  an  indispensable  function,  necessary 
at  all  times  for  religious  life  to  go  on.  This  seems  to  me  the 
first  conclusion  which  we  are  entitled  to  draw  from  the 
phenomena  we  have  passed  in  review. 

The  next  step  is  to  characterize  the  feelings.  To  what 
psychological  order  do  they  belong.'' 

The  resultant  outcome  of  them  is  in  any  case  what  Kant 
calls  a  "sthenic"  affection,  an  excitement  of  the  cheerful, 
expansive,  "dynamogenic"  order  which,  like  any  tonic, 
freshens  our  vital  powers.  In  almost  every  lecture,  but  espe- 
cially in  the  lectures  on  Conversion  and  on  Saintliness,  we 
have  seen  how  this  emotion  overcomes  temperamental 
melancholy  and  imparts  endurance  to  the  Subject,  or  a  zest, 
or  a  meaning,  or  an  enchantment  and  glory  to  the  common 
objects  of  hfe.^  The  name  of  "faith-state,"  by  which  Profes- 
sor Leuba  designates  it,  is  a  good  one.^  It  is  a  biological  as 
well  as  a  psychological  condition,  and  Tolstoy  is  absolutely 
accurate  in  classing  faith  among  the  forces  by  which  men 
live?  The  total  absence  of  it,  anhedonia,'*  means  collapse. 

The  faith-state  may  hold  a  very  minimum  of  intellectual 
content.  We  saw  examples  of  this  in  those  sudden  raptures 
of  the  divine  presence,  or  in  such  mystical  seizures  as  Dr. 
Bucke  described.^  It  may  be  a  mere  vague  enthusiasm,  half 
spiritual,  half  vital,  a  courage,  and  a  feeling  that  great  and 
wondrous  things  are  in  the  air.*' 

^  Compare,  for  instance,  pages  200,  215,  219,  222,  244-250,  270-273. 

2  American  Journal  of  Psychology,  vii.  345. 

2  Above,  p.  181. 

^  Above,  p.  143. 

^  Above,  p.  391. 

^  Example:  Henri  Perreyve  writes  to  Gratry:  "I  do  not  know  how 
to  deal  with  the  happiness  which  you  aroused  in  me  this  morning.  It 
overwhelms  me;  I  want  to  do  something,  yet  I  can  do  nothing  and 


496      THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

When,  however,  a  positive  intellectual  content  is  asso- 
ciated with  a  faith-state,  it  gets  invincibly  stamped  in  upon 
belief,^  and  this  explains  the  passionate  loyalty  of  religious 
persons  everywhere  to  the  minutest  details  of  their  so 
widely  differing  creeds.  Taking  creeds  and  faith-state  to- 
gether, as  forming  "religions,"  and  treating  these  as  purely 
subjective  phenomena,  without  regard  to  the  question  of 
their  "truth,"  we  are  obliged,  on  account  of  their  extraordi- 
nary influence  upon  action  and  endurance,  to  class  them 
amongst  the  most  important  biological  functions  of  man- 
kind. Their  stimulant  and  anaesthetic  effect  is  so  great  that 
Professor  Leuba,  in  a  recent  article,"  goes  so  far  as  to  say 

im  fit  for  nothing.  ...  I  would  fain  do  great  things."  Again,  after 
an  inspiring  interview,  he  writes:  "I  went  homewards,  intoxicated 
with  joy,  hope,  and  strengtii.  I  wanted  to  feed  upon  my  happiness  in 
sohtude,  far  from  all  men.  It  was  late;  but,  unheeding  that,  I  took  a 
mountain  path  and  went  on  like  a  madman,  looking  at  the  heavens, 
regardless  of  eardi.  Suddenly  an  insdnct  made  me  draw  hastily  back 
— I  was  on  the  very  edge  of  a  precipice,  one  step  more  and  I  must 
have  fallen.  I  took  fright  and  gave  up  my  nocturnal  promenade."  A. 
Gratry:  Henri  Perreyve,  London,  1872,  pp.  92,  89. 

This  primacy,  in  the  faith-state,  of  vague  expansive  impulse  over 
direction  is  well  expressed  in  Walt  Whitman's  lines  (Leaves  of  Grass, 
1872,  p.  190): — 
"O  to  confront  night,  storms,  hunger,  ridicule,  accidents,  rebuffs,  as 

the  trees  and  animals  do.  .  .  . 
Dear  Camerado!  I  confess  I  have  urged  you  onward  with  me,  and 

still  urge  you,  without  the  least  idea  what  is  our  destination. 
Or  whether  we  shall  be  victorious,  or  utterly  quell'd  and  defeated." 

This  readiness  for  great  things,  and  this  sense  that  the  world  by  its 
importance,  wonderfulness,  etc.,  is  apt  for  their  production,  would 
seem  to  be  the  undifferentiated  germ  of  all  the  higher  faiths.  Trust  in 
our  own  dreams  of  ambition,  or  in  our  country's  expansive  desti- 
nies, and  faith  in  the  providence  of  God,  all  have  their  source  in  that 
onrush  of  our  sanguine  impulses,  and  in  that  sense  of  the  exceeding- 
ness  of  the  possible  over  the  real. 

1  Compare  Leuba:  Loc.  cit.,  pp.  346-349. 

-  The  Contents  of  Religious  Consciousness,  in  The  Monist,  xi.  536, 
July  i9of. 


CONCLUSIONS  497 

that  so  long  as  men  can  use  their  God,  they  care  very  Uttle  ^  / 
who  he  is,  or  even  whether  he  is  at  all.  "The  truth  of  the  , 
matter  can  be  put,"  says  Leuba,  "in  this  way:  God  is  not 
\nown,  he  is  not  unda'stood;  he  is  used — sometimes  as 
meat-purveyor,  sometimes  as  moral  support,  sometimes  as 
friend,  sometimes  as  an  object  of  love.  If  he  proves  himself 
useful,  the  religious  consciousness  asks  for  no  more  than 
that.  Does  God  really  exist?  How  does  he  exist?  What  is 
he?  are  so  many  irrelevant  questions.  Not  God,  but  life, 
more  life,  a  larger,  richer,  more  satisfying  life,  is,  in  the 
last  analysis,  the  end  of  religion.  The  love  of  life,  at  any 
and  every  level  of  development,  is  the  religious  impulse."  ^ 
At  this  purely  subjective  rating,  therefore.  Religion  must 
be  considered  vindicated  in  a  certain  way  from  the  attacks 
of  her  critics.  It  would  seem  that  she  cannot  be  a  mere 
anachronism  and  survival,  but  must  exert  a  permanent 
function,  whether  she  be  with  or  without  intellectual  con- 
tent, and  whether,  if  she  have  any,  it  be  true  or  false. 

We  must  next  pass  beyond  the  point  of  view  of  merely 
subjective  utility,  and  make  inquiry  into  the  intellectual 
content  itself. 

First,  is  there,  under  all  the  discrepancies  of  the  creeds, 

^  Loc.  cit,  pp.  571,  572,  abridged.  See,  also,  this  writer's  extraor 
dinarily  true  criticism  of  the  notion  that  reUgion  primarily  seeks  to 
solve  the  intellectual  mystery  of  the  world.  Compare  what  W.  Bend- 
er says  (in  his  Wesen  der  Religion,  Bonn,  1888,  pp.  85,  38) :  "Not  the 
question  about  God,  and  not  the  inquiry  into  the  origin  and  purpose 
of  the  world  is  religion,  but  the  question  about  Man.  All  religious 
views  of  life  are  anthropocentric."  "Religion  is  that  activity  of  the 
human  impulse  towards  self-preservadon  by  means  of  which  Man 
seeks  to  cari^y  his  essendal  vital  purposes  through  against  the  adverse 
pressure  of  the  world  by  raising  himself  freely  towards  the  world's 
ordering  and  governing  powers  when  the  limits  of  his  own  strength 
are  reached."  The  whole  book  is  litde  more  than  a  development  o£ 
these  words. 


498       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

a  common  nucleus  to  which  they  bear  their  testimony 
unanimously? 

And  second,  ought  we  to  consider  the  testimony  true? 

T  will  take  up  the  first  question  first,  and  answer  it  im- 
mediately in  the  affirmative.  The  warring  gods  and  for- 
mulas o£  the  various  religions  do  indeed  cancel  each  other, 
but  there  is  a  certain  uniform  deliverance  in  which  religions 
all  appear  to  meet.  It  consists  of  two  parts: — 

1.  An  uneasiness;  and 

2.  Its  solution. 

1.  The  uneasiness,  reduced  to  its  simplest  terms,  is  a 
sense  that  there  is  something  wrong  about  us  as  we  nat- 
urally stand. 

2.  The  solution  is  a  sense  that  we  are  saved  from  the 
wrongness  by  making  proper  connection  with  the  higher 
powers. 

In  those  more  developed  minds  which  alone  we  are 
studying,  the  wrongness  takes  a  moral  character,  and  the 
salvation  takes  a  mystical  tinge.  I  think  we  shall  keep  well 
within  the  limits  of  what  is  common  to  all  such  minds  if 
we  formulate  the  essence  of  their  religious  experience  in 
terms  like  these: — 

The  individual,  so  far  as  he  suffers  from  his  wrongness 
and  criticises  it,  is  to  that  extent  consciously  beyond  it,  and 
in  at  least  possible  touch  with  something  higher,  if  anything 
higher  exist.  Along  with  the  wrong  part  there  is  thus  a 
better  part  of  him,  even  though  it  may  be  but  a  most  help- 
less germ.  With  which  part  he  should  identify  his  real  be- 
ing is  by  no  means  obvious  at  this  stage;  but  when  stage  2 
(the  stage  of  solution  or  salvation)  arrives,^  the  man  iden- 
tifies his  real  being  with  the  germinal  higher  part  of  him- 
self; and  does  so  in  the  following  way.  He  becomes  con- 

^  Remember  that  for  some  men  it  arri\es  suddenly,  for  others  grad- 
ually, whilst  others  again  practically  enjoy  it  all  their  life. 


CONCLUSIONS  499 

scious  that  this  higher  part  is  conterminous  and  continuous 
with  a  MORE  of  the  same  quality,  which  is  operative  in  the 
Universe  outside  of  him,  and  which  he  can  /{eep  in  word- 
ing touch  with,  and  in  a  fashion  get  on  board  of  and  save 
himself  when  all  his  lower  being  has  gone  to  pieces  in  the 
wrecf{. 

It  seems  to  me  that  all  the  phenomena  are  accurately 
describable  in  these  very  simple  general  terms.^  They  allow 
for  the  divided  self  and  the  struggle;  they  involve  the 
change  of  personal  centre  and  the  surrender  of  the  lower 
self;  they  express  the  appearance  of  exteriority  of  the  help- 
ing power  and  yet  account  for  our  sense  of  union  with  it;  ^ 
and  they  fully  justify  our  feelings  of  security  and  joy.  There 
is  probably  no  autobiographic  document,  among  all  those 
which  I  have  quoted,  to  which  the  description  will  not  well 
apply.  One  need  only  add  such  specific  details  as  will  adapt 
it  to  various  theologies  and  various  personal  temperaments, 
and  one  will  then  have  the  various  experiences  recon- 
structed in  their  individual  forms. 

So  far,  however,  as  this  analysis  goes,  the  experiences  are 
only  psychological  phenomena.  They  possess,  it  is  true, 
enormous  biological  worth.  Spiritual  strength  really  in- 
creases in  the  subject  when  he  has  them,  a  new  life  opens 
for  him,  and  they  seem  to  him  a  place  of  conflux  where  the 
forces  of  two  universes  meet;  and  yet  this  may  be  nothing 
but  his  subjective  way  of  feeling  things,  a  mood  of  his  own 
fancy,  in  spite  of  the  effects  produced.  I  now  turn  to  my 

^  The  practical  difficulties  are:  i,  to  "realize  the  reality"  of  one's 
higher  part;  2,  to  identify  one's  self  with  it  exclusively;  and  3,  to 
identify  it  with  all  the  rest  of  ideal  being. 

2  "When  mystical  acdvity  is  at  its  height,  we  find  consciousness  pos- 
sessed by  the  sense  of  a  being  at  once  excessive  and  identical  with  the 
self:  great  enough  to  be  God;  interior  enough  to  be  me.  The  "objec-^ 
tivity"  of  it  ought  in  that  case  to  be  called  excessivity,  rather,  or  ex- 
ceedingness."  Recejac:  Essai  sur  les  fondements  de  la  conscience 
mysUque,  1897,  p.  46. 


500       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

second  question:  What  is  the  objective  "truth"  of  their 
content?  ^ 

The  part  of  the  content  concerning  which  the  question 
of  truth  most  pertinently  arises  is  that  "more  of  the  same 
quahty"  with  which  our  own  higher  self  appears  in  the  ex- 
perience to  come  into  harmonious  working  relation.  Is  such 
a  "more"  merely  our  own  notion,  or  does  it  really  exist? 
If  so,  in  what  shape  does  it  exist?  Does  it  act,  as  well  as 
■exist?  And  in  what  form  should  we  conceive  of  that 
"union"  with  it  of  which  religious  geniuses  are  so  con- 
vinced ? 

It  is  in  answering  these  questions  that  the  various  the- 
ologies perform  their  theoretic  work,  and  that  their  diver- 
gencies most  come  to  light.  They  all  agree  that  the  "more" 
really  exists;  though  some  of  them  hold  it  to  exist  in  the 
shape  of  a  personal  god  or  gods,  while  others  are  satisfied 
to  conceive  it  as  a  stream  of  ideal  tendency  embedded  in 
the  eternal  structure  of  the  world.  They  all  agree,  moreover, 
that  it  acts  as  well  as  exists,  and  that  something  really  is 
effected  for  the  better  when  you  throw  your  life  into  its 
hands.  It  is  when  they  treat  of  the  experience  of  "union" 
with  it  that  their  speculative  differences  appear  most  clear- 
ly. Over  this  point  pantheism  and  theism,  nature  and  second 
birth,  works  and  grace  and  karma,  immortality  and  rein- 
carnation, rationalism  and  mysticism,  carry  on  inveterate 
disputes. 

At  the  end  of  my  lecture  on  Philosophy  "  I  held  out  the 
notion  that  an  impartial  science  of  religions  might  sift  out 
from  the  midst  of  their  discrepancies  a  common  body  of 
doctrine  which  she  might  also  formulate  in  terms  to  which 

1  The  word  "truth"  is  here  taken  to  mean  something  additional  to 
bare  value  for  life,  although  the  natural  propensity  of  man  is  to  be- 
lieve that  whatever  has  great  value  for  life  is  thereby  certified  as  true. 

-  Above,  p.  445. 


CONCLUSIONS  501 

physical  science  need  not  object.  This,  I  said,  she  might 
adopt  as  her  own  reconciUng  hypothesis,  and  recommend 
it  for  general  belief.  I  also  said  that  in  my  last  lecture  I 
should  have  to  try  my  own  hand  at  framing  such  an 
hypothesis. 

The  time  has  now  come  for  this  attempt.  Who  says  "hy- 
pothesis" renounces  the  ambition  to  be  coercive  in  his  argu- 
ments. The  most  I  can  do  is,  accordingly,  to  ofifer  some- 
thing that  may  fit  the  facts  so  easily  that  your  scientific 
logic  will  find  no  plausible  pretext  for  vetoing  your  impulse 
to  welcome  it  as  true. 

The  "more,"  as  we  called  it,  and  the  meaning  of  our 
"union"  with  it,  form  the  nucleus  of  our  inquiry.  Into  what 
definite  description  can  these  words  be  translated,  and  for 
what  definite  facts  do  they  stand?  It  would  never  do  for  us 
to  place  ourselves  ofifhand  at  the  position  of  a  particular 
theology,  the  Christian  theology,  for  example,  and  proceed 
immediately  to  define  the  "more"  as  Jehovah,  and  the 
"union"  as  his  imputation  to  us  of  the  righteousness  of 
Christ.  That  would  be  unfair  to  other  religions,  and,  from 
our  present  standpoint  at  least,  would  be  an  over-belief. 

We  must  begin  by  using  less  particularized  terms;  and, 
since  one  of  the  duties  of  the  science  of  religions  is  to  keep 
religion  in  connection  with  the  rest  of  science,  we  shall  do 
well  to  seek  first  of  all  a  way  of  describing  the  "more," 
which  psychologists  may  also  recognize  as  real.  The  subcon- 
scious self  is  nowadays  a  well-accredited  psychological  en- 
tity; and  I  believe  that  in  it  we  have  exactly  the  mediating 
term  required.  Apart  from  all  religious  considerations,  there 
is  actually  and  literally  more  life  in  our  total  soul  than  we 
are  at  any  time  aware  of.  The  exploration  of  the  trans- 
marginal  field  has  hardly  yet  been  seriously  undertaken, 
but  what  Mr.  Myers  said  in  1892  in  his  essay  on  the  Sub' 


502       THE  VARIETIES   OF  RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

liminal  Consciousness  ^  is  as  true  as  when  it  was  first  writ- 
ten: "Each  of  us  is  in  reality  an  abiding  psychical  entity  far 
more  extensive  than  he  knows — an  individuality  which  can 
never  express  itself  completely  through  any  corporeal  mani- 
festation. The  Self  manifests  through  the  organism;  but 
there  is  always  some  part  of  the  Self  unmanifested;  and  al- 
ways, as  it  seems,  some  power  of  organic  expression  in  abey- 
ance or  reserve."  ^  Much  of  the  content  of  this  larger  back- 
ground against  which  our  conscious  being  stands  out  in  re- 
Hef  is  insignificant.  Imperfect  memories,  silly  jingles,  inhibi- 
tive  timidities,  "dissolutive"  phenomena  of  various  sorts, 
as  Myers  calls  them,  enters  into  it  for  a  large  part.  But  in  it 
many  of  the  performances  of  genius  seem  also  to  have  their 
origin;  and  in  our  study  of  conversion,  of  mystical  experi- 
ences, and  of  prayer,  we  have  seen  hov/  striking  a  part  in- 
vasions from  this  region  play  in  the  religious  life. 

Let  me  then  propose,  as  an  hypothesis,  that  whatever  it 
may  be  on  its  farther  side,  the  "more"  with  which  in  reli- 
gious experience  we  feel  ourselves  connected  is  on  its  hither 
side  the  subconscious  continuation  of  our  conscious  life. 
Starting  thus  with  a  recognized  psychological  fact  as  our 
basis,  we  seem  to  preserve  a  contact  with  "science"  which 

1  Proceedings  of  the  Society  for  Psychical  Research,  vol.  \ii.  p.  305. 
For  a  full  statement  of  Mr.  Myers's  \iews,  I  may  refer  to  his  posthu- 
mous work,  "Human  Personality  in  the  Light  of  Recent  Research," 
which  is  already  announced  by  Messrs.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  as  be- 
ing in  press.  Mr.  Myers  for  the  first  time  proposed  as  a  general  psycho- 
logical problem  the  exploradon  of  the  subliminal  region  of  con- 
sciousness throughout  its  whole  extent,  and  made  the  first  method- 
ical steps  in  its  topography  by  treadng  as  a  namral  series  a  mass  of 
subliminal  facts  hitherto  considered  only  as  curious  isolated  facts, 
and  subjecdng  them  to  a  systematized  nomenclature.  How  important 
this  exploration  will  prove,  future  work  upon  the  path  which  Myers 
has  opened  can  alone  show.  Compare  my  paper:  "Frederic  Myers's 
Services  to  Psychology,"  in  the  said  Proceedings,  part  xhi.,  May,  1901. 

2  Compare  the  inventory  given  above  on  pp.  472-4,  and  also  what 
's  said  of  the  subconscious  self  on  pp.  228-231,  235-236. 


CONCLUSIONS  503 

the  ordinary  theologian  lacks.  At  the  same  time  the  the- 
ologian's contention  that  the  rehgious  man  is  moved  by  an 
external  power  is  vindicated,  for  it  is  one  of  the  peculiarities 
of  invasions  from  the  subconscious  region  to  take  on  objec 
tive  appearances,  and  to  suggest  to  the  Subject  an  external 
control.  In  the  religious  life  the  control  is  felt  as  "higher"; 
but  since  on  our  hypothesis  it  is  primarily  the  higher  facul- 
ties of  our  ow^n  hidden  mind  which  are  controlling,  the 
sense  of  union  with  the  power  beyond  us  is  a  sense  of  some- 
thing, not  merely  apparently,  but  literally  true. 

This  doorway  into  the  subject  seems  to  me  the  best  one 
for  a  science  of  religions,  for  it  mediates  between  a  number 
of  different  points  of  view.  Yet  it  is  only  a  doorway,  and 
difficulties  present  themselves  as  soon  as  we  step  through  it, 
and  ask  how  far  our  transmarginal  consciousness  carries  us 
if  we  follow  it  on  its  remoter  side.  Here  the  over-beliefs  be- 
gin: here  mysticism  and  the  conversion-rapture  and  Vedant- 
ism  and  transcendental  idealism  bring  in  their  monistic 
interpretations^  and  tell  us  that  the  finite  self  rejoins  the 
absolute  self,  for  it  was  always  one  with  God  and  identical 
with  the  soul  of  the  world.^  Here  the  prophets  of  all  the 

1  Compare  above,  pp.  410  fl. 

2  One  more  expression  of  this  belief,  to  increase  the  reader's  famil- 
iarity with  the  notion  of  it: — 

"If  this  room  is  full  of  darkness  for  thousands  of  years,  and  you 
come  in  and  begin  to  weep  and  wail,  'Oh,  the  darkness,'  will  the  dark- 
ness vanish?  Bring  the  light  in,  strike  a  match,  and  light  comes  in  a 
moment.  So  what  good  will  it  do  you  to  think  all  your  lives,  'Oh,  I 
have  done  evil,  I  have  made  many  mistakes'?  It  requires  no  ghost  to 
tell  us  that.  Bring  in  the  Ught,  and  the  evil  goes  in  a  moment. 
Strengthen  the  real  nature,  build  up  yourselves,  the  effulgent,  the 
resplendent,  the  ever  pure,  call  that  up  in  every  one  whom  you  see.  I 
wish  that  every  one  of  us  had  come  to  such  a  state  that  even  when  we 
see  the  vilest  of  human  beings  we  can  see  the  God  within,  and  instead 
of  condemning,  say,  'Rise,  thou  effulgent  One,  rise  thou  who  art  al- 
ways pure,  rise  thou  birthlcss  and  deathless,  rise  almighty,  and  mani- 
fest your  nature.'  .  .  .    This  is  the  highest  prayer  that  the  Advaita 


504       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

different  religions  come  with  their  visions,  voices,  raptures, 
and  other  openings,  supposed  by  each  to  authenticate  his 
own  pecuHar  faith. 

Those  of  us  who  are  not  personally  favored  with  such 
specific  revelations  must  stand  outside  of  them  altogether 
and,  for  the  present  at  least,  decide  that,  since  they  corrobo- 
rate incompatible  theological  doctrines,  they  neutralize  one 
another  and  leave  no  fixed  results.  If  we  follow  any  one  of 
them,  or  if  we  follow  philosophical  theory  and  embrace 
monistic  pantheism  on  non-mystical  grounds,  we  do  so  in 
the  exercise  of  our  individual  freedom,  and  build  out  our 
religion  in  the  way  most  congruous  with  our  personal  sus- 
ceptibilities. Among  these  susceptibilities  intellectual  ones 
play  a  decisive  part.  Although  the  religious  question  is 
primarily  a  question  of  life,  of  living  or  not  living  in  the 
higher  union  which  opens  itself  to  us  as  a  gift,  yet  the  spir- 
itual excitement  in  which  the  gift  appears  a  real  one  will 
often  fail  to  be  aroused  in  an  individual  until  certain  par- 
ticular intellectual  beliefs  or  ideas  which,  as  we  say,  come 
home  to  him,  are  touched.^  These  ideas  will  thus  be  essen- 

teachcs.  This  is  the  one  prayer:  remembering  our  nature."  .  .  . 
"Why  does  man  go  out  to  look  for  a  God?  ...  It  is  your  own  heart 
beating,  and  you  did  not  know,  you  were  mistaking  it  for  something 
external.  He,  nearest  of  the  near,  my  own  self,  the  reality  of  my  own 
Hfe,  my  body  and  my  soul. — I  am  Thee  and  Thou  art  Me.  That  is 
your  own  nature.  Assert  it,  manifest  it.  Not  to  become  pure,  you  are 
pure  already.  You  are  not  to  be  perfect,  you  are  that  already.  Every 
good  thought  which  you  think  or  act  upon  is  siniply  tearing  the  veil, 
as  it  were,  and  the  purity,  the  Infinity,  the  God  behind,  manifests 
itself — the  eternal  Subject  of  everything,  the  eternal  Witness  in  this 
universe,  your  own  Self.  Knowledge  is,  as  it  were,  a  lower  step,  a 
degradation.  We  are  It  already;  how  to  know  It?"  Swami  Vivekan- 
anda:  Addresses,  No.  XII.,  Pracdcal  Vedanta,  part  iv.  pp.  172,  174, 
London,  1897;  and  Lectures,  The  Real  and  the  Apparent  Man,  p.  24, 
abridged. 

^  For  instance,  here  is  a  case  where  a  person  exposed  from  her  birth 
to  Christian  ideas  had  to  wait  till  they  came  to  her  clad  in  spiritistic 


CONCLUSIONS  505 

rial  to  that  individual's  religion; — which  is  as  much  as  to 
say  that  over-beliefs  in  various  directions  are  absolutely  in- 
dispensable, and  that  we  should  treat  them  with  tenderness 
and  tolerance  so  long  as  they  are  not  intolerant  themselves. 
As  I  have  elsewhere  written,  the  most  interesting  and  valu- 
able things  about  a  man  are  usually  his  over-beliefs. 

Disregarding  the  over-beliefs,  and  confining  ourselves  tc 
what  is  common  and  generic,  we  have  in  the  fact  that  the 
conscious  person  is  continuous  with  a  wider  self  through 
which  saving  experiences  come^  a  positive  content  of  reli- 
gious experience  which,  it  seems  to  me,  is  literally  and  ob- 
jectively true  as  far  as  it  goes.  If  I  now  proceed  to  state  my 
own  hypothesis  about  the  farther  limits  of  this  extension  of 
our  personality,  I  shall  be  offering  my  own  over-belief — 
though  I  know  it  will  appear  a  sorry  under-belief  to  some 
of  you — for  which  I  can  only  bespeak  the  same  indulgence 
which  in  a  converse  case  I  should  accord  to  yours. 

formulas  before  the  saving  experience  set  in: — 

"For  myself  I  can  say  that  spiritualism  has  saved  me.  It  was  re- 
vealed to  me  at  a  critical  moment  of  my  life,  and  without  it  I  don't 
know  what  I  should  have  done.  It  has  taught  me  to  detach  myself 
from  worldly  things  and  to  place  my  hope  in  things  to  come. 
Through  it  I  have  learned  to  see  in  all  men,  even  in  those  most  crim- 
inal, even  in  those  from  whom  I  have  most  suffered,  undeveloped 
brothers  to  whom  I  owed  assistance,  love,  and  forgiveness.  I  have 
learned  that  I  must  lose  my  temper  over  nothing,  despise  no  one. 
and  pray  for  all.  Most  of  all  I  have  learned  to  pray!  And  although  I 
have  still  much  to  learn  in  this  domain,  prayer  ever  brings  me  more 
strength,  consolation,  and  comfort.  I  feel  more  than  ever  that  I  have 
only  made  a  few  steps  on  the  long  road  of  progress;  but  I  look  at  its 
length  without  dismay,  for  I  have  confidence  that  the  day  will  come 
when  all  my  efforts  shall  be  rewarded.  So  Spiritualism  has  a  great 
place  in  my  life,  indeed  it  holds  the  first  place  there."  Flournoy  Col- 
lection. 

^  "The  influence  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  exquisitely  called  the  Com- 
forter, is  a  matter  of  actual  experience,  as  solid  a  reality  as  that  of 
electro-magnetism."  W.  C.  Brownell,  Scribner's  Magazine,  vol.  xxx. 
p.  112. 


506       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

The  further  hmits  of  our  being  plunge,  it  seems  to  me, 
into  an  altogether  other  dimension  of  existence  from  the 
sensible  and  merely  "understandable"  world.  Name  it  the 
mystical  region,  or  the  supernatural  region,  whichever  you 
choose.  So  far  as  our  ideal  impulses  originate  in  this  region 
(and  most  of  them  do  originate  in  it,  for  we  find  them 
possessing  us  in  a  way  for  which  we  cannot  articulately  ac- 
count), we  belong  to  it  in  a  more  intimate  sense  than  that 
in  which  we  belong  to  the  visible  world,  for  we  belong  in 
the  most  intimate  sense  wherever  our  ideals  belong.  Yet  the 
unseen  region  in  question  is  not  merely  ideal,  for  it  pro- 
duces effects  in  this  world.  When  we  commune  with  it, 
work  is  actually  done  upon  our  finite  personality,  for  we  are 
turned  into  new  men,  and  consequences  in  the  way  of  con- 
duct follow  in  the  natural  world  upon  our  regenerative 
change.^  But  that  which  produces  effects  within  another 
reality  must  be  termed  a  reality  itself,  so  I  feel  as  if  we  had 

^  That  the  transaction  of  opening  ourselves,  otherwise  called  pray- 
er, is  a  perfectly  definite  one  for  certain  persons,  appears  abundandy 
in  the  preceding  lectures.  I  append  another  concrete  example  to  rein- 
force die  impression  on  the  reader's  mind: — 

"Man  can  learn  to  transcend  these  limitadons  [of  finite  thought] 
and  draw  power  and  wisdom  at  will.  .  .  .  The  divine  presence  is 
known  through  experience.  The  turning  to  a  higher  plane  is  a  dis- 
tinct act  of  consciousness.  It  is  not  a  vague,  twilight  or  semi-conscious 
experience.  It  is  not  an  ecstasy;  it  is  not  a  trance.  It  is  not  super-con- 
sciousness in  the  Vedandc  sense.  It  is  not  due  to  self-hypnotizadon.  It 
is  a  perfectly  calm,  sane,  sound,  rational,  common-sense  shifting  of 
consciousness  from  the  phenomena  of  sense-perception  to  the  phe- 
nomena of  seership,  from  the  thought  of  self  to  a  distinctively  higher 
realm.  .  .  .  For  example,  if  the  lower  self  be  nervous,  anxious, 
tense,  one  can  in  a  few  moments  compel  it  to  be  calm.  This  is  not 
done  by  a  word  simply.  Again  I  say,  it  is  not  hypnotism.  It  is  by  the 
exercise  of  power.  One  feels  the  spirit  of  peace  as  definitely  as  heat  is 
perceived  on  a  hot  summer  day.  The  power  can  be  as  surely  used  as 
the  sun's  rays  can  be  focused  and  made  to  do  work,  to  set  fire  to 
wood."  The  Higher  Law,  vol.  iv.  pp.  4,  6,  Boston,  August,  1901. 


CONCLUSIONS  507 

no  philosophic  excuse  for  caUing  the  unseen  or  mystical 
world  unreal. 

God  is  the  natural  appellation,  for  us  Christians  at  least, 
for  the  supreme  reality,  so  I  will  call  this  higher  part  of  the 
universe  by  the  name  of  God.^  We  and  God  have  business 
with  each  other;  and  in  opening  ourselves  to  his  influence 
our  deepest  destiny  is  fulfilled.  The  universe,  at  those  parts 
of  it  which  our  personal  being  constitutes,  takes  a  turn  genu- 
inely for  the  worse  or  for  the  better  in  proportion  as  each 
one  of  us  fulfills  or  evades  God's  demands.  As  far  as  this 
goes  I  probably  have  you  with  me,  for  I  only  translate  into 
schematic  language  what  I  may  call  the  instinctive  belief 
of  mankind:  God  is  real  since  he  produces  real  effects. 

The  real  effects  in  question,  so  far  as  I  have  as  yet  ad- 
mitted them,  are  exerted  on  the  personal  centres  of  energy 
of  the  various  subjects,  but  the  spontaneous  faith  of  most 
of  the  subjects  is  that  they  embrace  a  wider  sphere  than 
this.  Most  religious  men  believe  (or  "know,"  if  they  be 
mystical)  that  not  only  they  themselves,  but  the  whole  uni- 
verse of  beings  to  whom  the  God  is  present,  are  secure  in 
his  parental  hands.  There  is  a  sense,  a  dimension,  they  arc 
sure,  in  which  we  are  all  saved,  in  spite  of  the  gates  of  hell 
and  all  adverse  terrestrial  appearances.  God's  existence  i., 
the  guarantee  of  an  ideal  order  that  shall  be  permanently 
preserved.  This  world  may  indeed,  as  science  assures  us. 
some  day  burn  up  or  freeze;  but  if  it  is  part  of  his  order, 
the  old  ideals  are  sure  to  be  brought  elsewhere  to  fruition, 
so  that  where  God  is,  tragedy  is  only  provisional  and  par- 
tial, and  shipwreck  and  dissolution  are  not  the  absolutely 
final  things.  Only  when  this  farther  step  of  faith  concern- 

^  Transcendentalists  are  fond  of  the  term  "Over-soul,"  but  as  a  rule 
they  use  it  in  an  intellectualist  sense,  as  meaning  only  a  medium  of 
communion.  "God"  is  a  causal  agent  as  well  as  a  medium  of  com- 
munion, and  that  is  the  aspect  which  I  wish  to  emphasize. 


508       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

ing  God  is  taken,  and  remote  objective  consequences  are 
predicted,  does  religion,  as  it  seems  to  me,  get  wholly  free 
from  the  first  immediate  subjective  experience,  and  bring 
a  real  hypothesis  into  play.  A  good  hypothesis  in  science 
must  have  other  properties  than  those  of  the  phenomenon 
it  is  immediately  invoked  to  explain,  otherwise  it  is  not 
prolific  enough.  God,  meaning  only  what  enters  into  the 
religious  man's  experience  of  union,  falls  short  of  being  an 
hypothesis  of  this  more  useful  order.  He  needs  to  enter  into 
wider  cosmic  relations  in  order  to  justify  the  subject's  iibso- 
lute  confidence  and  peace. 

That  the  God  with  whom,  starting  from  the  hither  side 
of  our  own  extra-marginal  self,  we  come  at  its  remoter  mar- 
gin into  commerce  should  be  the  absolute  world-ruler,  is  of 
course  a  very  considerable  over-belief.  Over-belief  as  it  is, 
though,  it  is  an  article  of  almost  every  one's  religion.  Most 
of  us  pretend  in  some  way  to  prop  it  upon  our  philosophy, 
but  the  philosophy  itself  is  really  propped  upon  this  faith. 
What  is  this  but  to  say  that  Religion,  in  her  fullest  exercise 
of  function,  is  not  a  mere  illumination  of  facts  already  else- 
where given,  not  a  mere  passion,  like  love,  which  views 
things  in  a  rosier  light.  It  is  indeed  that,  as  we  have  seen 
abundantly.  But  it  is  something  more,  namely,  a  postulator 
of  new  facts  as  well.  The  world  interpreted  religiously  is 
not  the  materialistic  world  over  again,  with  an  altered  ex- 
pression; it  must  have,  over  and  above  the  altered  expres- 
sion, a  natural  constitution  different  at  some  point  from 
that  which  a  materialistic  world  would  have.  It  must  be 
such  that  different  events  can  be  expected  in  it,  different 
conduct  must  be  required. 

This  thoroughly  "pragmatic"  view  of  religion  has  usually 
been  taken  as  a  matter  of  course  by  common  men.  They 
have  interpolated  divine  miracles  into  the  field  of  nature, 
they  have  built  a  heaven  out  beyond  the  grave.  It  is  only 
transcendentalist  metaphysicians  who  think  that,  without 


CONCLUSIONS  509 

adding  any  concrete  details  to  Nature,  or  subtracting  any, 
but  by  simply  calling  it  the  expression  of  absolute  spirit, 
you  make  it  more  divine  just  as  it  stands.  I  believe  the  prag-  v 
matic  v^^ay  of  taking  religion  to  be  the  deeper  way.  It  gives 
it  body  as  well  as  soul,  it  makes  it  claim,  as  everything  real 
must  claim,, some  characteristic  realm  of  fact  as  its  very  own. 
What  the  more  characteristically  divine  facts  are,  apart  from 
the  actual  inflow  of  energy  in  the  faith-state  and  the  prayer- 
state,  I  know  not.  But  the  over-beUef  on  which  I  am  ready 
to  make  my  personal  venture  is  that  they  exist.  The  whole 
drift  of  my  education  goes  tc  persuade  me  that  the  world  of 
our  present  consciousness  is  only  one  out  of  many  worlds  of 
consciousness  that  exist,  and  that  those  other  worlds  must 
contain  experiences  which  have  a  meaning  for  our  life  also; . 
and  that  although  in  the  main  their  experiences  and  those 
of  this  world  keep  discrete,  yet  the  two  become  continuous 
at  certain  points,  and  higher  energies  filter  in.  By  being 
faithful  in  my  poor  measure  to  this  over-belief,  I  seem  to 
myself  to  keep  more  sane  and  true.  I  can,  of  course,  put  my- 
self into  the  sectarian  scientist's  attitude,  and  imagine  vivid- 
ly that  the  world  of  sensations  and  of  scientific  laws  and 
objects  may  be  all.  But  whenever  I  do  this,  I  hear  that  in- 
ward monitor  of  which  W.  K.  Clifford  once  wrote,  whisper- 
ing the  word  "bosh!"  Humbug  is  humbug,  even  though  it 
bear  the  scientific  name,  and  the  total  expression  of  human 
experience,  as  I  view  it  objectively,  invincibly  urges  me  be- 
yond the  narrow  "scientific"  bounds.  Assuredly,  the  real 
world  is  of  a  different  temperament — more  intricately  built 
than  physical  science  allows.  So  my  objective  and  my  sub- 
jective conscience  both  hold  me  to  the  over-belief  which  I 
express.  Who  knows  whether  the  faithfulness  of  individuals 
here  below  to  their  own  poor  over-beliefs  may  not  actually 
help  God  in  turn  to  be  more  effectively  faithful  to  his  own 
greater  tasks? 


POSTSCRIPT 

IN  writing  my  concluding  lecture  I  had  to  aim  so  much 
at  simplification  that  I  fear  that  my  general  philosophic 
position  received  so  scant  a  statement  as  hardly  to  be  intel- 
ligible to  some  of  my  readers.  I  therefore  add  this  epilogue, 
which  niust  also  be  so  brief  as  possibly  to  remedy  but  little 
"■he  defect.  In  a  later  work  I  may  be  enabled  to  state  my  posi- 
tion more  amply  and  consequently  more  clearly. 

Originality  cannot  be  expected  in  a  field  like  this,  where 
all  the  attitudes  and  tempers  that  are  possible  have  been  ex- 
hibited in  literature  long  ago,  and  where  any  new  writer  can 
immediately  be  classed  under  a  familiar  head.  If  one  should 
make  a  division  of  all  thinkers  into  naturalists  and  super- 
naturalists,  I  should  undoubtedly  have  to  go,  along  with 
most  philosophers,  into  the  supernaturalist  branch.  But  there 
is  a  crasser  and  a  more  refined  supernaturalism,  and  it  is  to 
the  refi.ned  division  that  most  philosophers  at  the  present 
day  belong.  If  not  regular  transcendental  idealists,  they  at 
least  obey  the  Kantian  direction  enough  to  bar  out  ideal 
entities  from  interfering  causally  in  the  course  of  phenom- 
enal events.  Refined  supernaturalism  is  universalistic  super- 
naturalism;  for  the  "crasser"  variety  "piecemeal"  super- 
naturalism would  perhaps  be  the  better  name.  It  went  with 
that  older  theology  which  to-day  is  supposed  to  reign  only 
am.ong  uneducated  people,  or  to  be  found  among  the  few 
belated  professors  of  the  dualisms  which  Kant  is  thought 
to  have  displaced.  It  adm.its  miracles  and  providential  lead- 
ings, and  Finds  no  intellectual  difficulty  in  mixing  the  ideal 
and  the  real  worlds  together  by  interpolating  influences 
from  the  ideal  region  among  the  forces  that  causally  deter- 

510 


POSTSCRIPT  511 

mine  the  real  world's  details.  In  this  the  refined  supernat' 
uralists  think  that  it  muddles  disparate  dimensions  of  exist- 
ence. For  them  the  world  of  the  ideal  has  no  efficient  causal- 
ity, and  never  bursts  into  the  world  of  phenomena  at  par-  ' 
ticular  points.  The  ideal  world,  for  them,  is  not  a  world  of 
facts,  but  only  of  the  meaning  of  facts;  it  is  a  point  of  view 
for  judging  facts.  It  appertains  to  a  different  "-ology,"  and 
inhabits  a  different  dimension  of  being  altogether  from  that 
in  which  existential  propositions  obtain.  It  cannot  get  down 
upon  the  flat  level  of  experience  and  interpolate  itself  piece- 
meal between  distinct  portions  of  nature,  as  those  who  be- 
lieve, for  example,  in  divine  aid  coming  in  response  tct 
prayer,  are  bound  to  think  it  must. 

Notwithstanding  my  own  inability  to  accept  either  popu. 
lar  Christianity  or  scholastic  theism,  I  suppose  that  my  be- 
lief that  in  communion  with  the  Ideal  new  force  comes  intO/ 
the  world,  and  new  departures  are  made  here  below,  sub- 
jects me  to  being  classed  among  the  supernaturalists  of  the 
piecemeal  or  crasser  type.  Universalistic  supernaturalism 
surrenders,  it  seems  to  me,  too  easily  to  naturalism.  It  takes 
the  facts  of  physical  science  at  their  face-value,  and  leaves 
the  laws  of  life  just  as  naturalism  finds  them,  with  no  hope 
of  remedy,  in  case  their  fruits  are  bad.  It  confines  itself  to 
sentiments  about  life  as  a  whole,  sentiments  which  may  be 
admiring  and  adoring,  but  which  need  not  be  so,  as  the 
existence  of  systematic  pessimism  proves.  In  this  universal- 
istic way  of  taking  the  ideal  world,  the  essence  of  practical 
religion  seems  to  me  to  evaporate.  Both  instinctively  and 
for  logical  reasons,  I  find  it  hard  to  believe  that  principles 
can  exist  which  make  no  difference  in  facts.-^  But  all  facts 

^  Transcendental  idealism,  of  course,  insists  that  its  ideal  world 
makes  this  difference,  that  facts  exist.  We  owe  it  to  the  Absolute  that 
we  have  a  world  of  fact  at  all.  "A  world"  of  fact! — that  exactly  is  the 
trouble.  An  entire  world  is  the  smallest  unit  with  which  the  Absolute 
can  work,  whereas  to  our  finite  minds  work  for  the  better  ought  to  be 


};J^- 


512       THE  VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS   EXPERIENCE 

are  particular  facts,  and  the  whole  interest  of  the  question 
of  God's  existence  seems  to  me  to  Ue  in  the  consequences 
for  particulars  which  that  existence  may  be  expected  to  en- 
tail. That  no  concrete  particular  of  experience  should  alter 
its  complexion  in  consequence  of  a  God  being  there  seems 
io  me  an  incredible  proposition,  and  yet  it  is  the  thesis  to 
which  (implicitly  at  any  rate)  refined  supernaturalism 
seems  to  cling.  It  is  only  with  experience  en  bloc,  it  says, 
that  the  Absolute  maintains  relations.  It  condescends  to  no 
transactions  of  detail. 

I  am  ignorant  of  Buddhism  and  speak  under  correction, 
and  merely  in  order  the  better  to  describe  my  general  point 
of  view;  but  as  I  apprehend  the  Buddhistic  doctrine  of 
Karma,  I  agree  in  principle  with  that.  All  supernaturalists 
admit  that  facts  are  under  the  judgment  of  higher  law;  but 
for  Buddhism  as  I  interpret  it,  and  for  religion  generally  so 
far  as  it  remains  unweakened  by  transcendentalistic  meta- 
physics, the  word  "judgment"  here  means  no  such  bare 
academic  verdict  or  platonic  appreciation  as  it  means  in 
Vedantic  or  modern  absolutist  systems;  it  carries,  on  the 
contrary,  execution  with  it,  is  in  rebus  as  well  as  post  rem, 
and  operates  "causally"  as  partial  factor  in  the  total  fact. 
The  universe  becomes  a  gnosticism^  pure  and  simple  on 
iny  other  terms.  But  this  view  that  judgment  and  execution 

done  within  this  world,  setting  in  at  single  points.  Our  difficulties 
and  our  ideals  are  all  piecemeal  affairs,  but  the  Absolute  can  do  no 
piecework  for  us;  so  that  all  the  interests  which  our  poor  souls  com- 
pass raise  their  heads  too  late.  We  should  have  spoken  earlier,  prayed 
for  another  world  absolutely,  before  this  world  was  born.  It  is 
strange,  I  have  heard  a  friend  say,  to  see  this  blind  corner  into  which 
Christian  thought  has  worked  itself  at  last,  with  its  God  who  can 
raise  no  particular  weight  whatever,  who  can  help  us  with  no  pri- 
vate burden,  and  who  is  on  the  side  of  our  enemies  as  much  as  he  is 
on  our  own.  Odd  evolution  from  the  God  of  David's  psalms! 

^  Sec  my  Will  to  Believe  and  other  Essays  in  popular  Philosophy, 
H897,  p.  165. 


POSTSCRIPT  ■  513 

go  together  is  that  of  the  crasser  supernaturaHst  way  of 
thinking,  so  the  present  volume  must  on  the  whole  be 
classed  with  the  other  expressions  of  that  creed. 

I  state  the  matter  thus  bluntly,  because  the  current  of 
thought  in  academic  circles  runs  against  me,  and  I  feel  like 
a  man  who  must  set  his  back  against  an  open  door  quickly 
if  he  does  not  wish  to  see  it  closed  and  locked.  In  spite  of 
its  being  so  shocking  to  the  reigning  intellectual  tastes,  I 
believe  that  a  candid  consideration  of  piecemeal  supernat- 
uralism  and  a  complete  discussion  of  all  its  metaphysical 
bearings  will  show  it  to  be  the  hypothesis  by  which  the 
largest  number  of  legitimate  requirements  are  met.  That  of 
course  would  be  a  program  for  other  books  than  this;  what 
I  now  say  sufficiently  indicates  to  the  philosophic  reader  the 
place  where  I  belong. 

If  asked  just  where  the  differences  in  fact  which  are  due 
to  God's  existence  come  in,  I  should  have  to  say  that  in 
general  I  have  no  hypothesis  to  offer  beyond  what  the  phe- 
nomenon of  "prayerful  communion,"  especially  when  cer- 
tain kinds  of  incursion  from  the  subconscious  region  take 
part  in  it,  immediately  suggests.  The  appearance  is  that  in 
this  phenomenon  something  ideal,  which  in  one  sense  is 
part  of  ourselves  and  in  another  sense  is  not  ourselves,  ac- 
tually exerts  an  influence,  raises  our  centre  of  personal 
energy,  and  produces  regenerative  effects  unattainable  in 
other  ways.  If,  then,  there  be  a  wider  world  of  being  than 
that  of  our  every-day  consciousness,  if  in  it  there  be  forces 
whose  effects  on  us  are  intermittent,  if  one  facilitating  con- 
dition of  the  effects  be  the  openness  of  the  "subliminal" 
door,  we  have  the  elements  of  a  theory  to  which  the  phe- 
nomena of  religious  life  lend  plausibility.  I  am  so  impressed 
by  the  importance  of  these  phenomena  that  I  adopt  the 
hypothesis  which  they  so  naturally  suggest.  At  these  place? 
at  least,  I  say,  it  would  seem  as  though  transmundanc 
energies,  God,  if  you  will,  produced  immediate  effects  with- 


514       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

in  the  natural  world  to  which  the  rest  of  our  experience 
belongs. 

The  difference  in  natural  "fact"  which  most  of  us  would 
assign  as  the  first  difference  which  the  existence  of  a  God 
ought  to  make  would,  I  imagine,  be  personal  immortality. 
Religion,  in  fact,  for  the  great  majority  of  our  own  race 
means  immortality,  and  nothing  else.  God  is  the  producer 
of  immortality;  and  whoever  has  doubts  of  immortality  is 
written  down  as  an  atheist  without  farther  trial.  I  have  said 
nothing  in  my  lectures  about  immortality  or  the  belief  there- 
in, for  to  me  it  seems  a  secondary  point.  If  our  ideals  are 
only  cared  for  in  "eternity,"  I  do  not  see  why  we  might  not 
be  willing  to  resign  their  care  to  other  hands  than  ours.  Yet 
I  sympathize  with  the  urgent  impulse  to  be  present  our- 
selves, and  in  the  conflict  of  impulses,  both  of  them  so  vague 
yet  both  of  them  noble,  I  know  not  how  to  decide.  It  seems 
to  me  that  it  is  eminently  a  case  for  facts  to  testify.  Facts, 
I  think,  are  yet  lacking  to  prove  "spirit-return,"  though  I 
have  the  highest  respect  for  the  patient  labors  of  Messrs. 
Myers,  Hodgson,  and  Hyslop,  and  am  somewhat  impressed 
by  their  favorable  conclusions.  I  consequently  leave  the  mat- 
ter open,  with  this  brief  word  to  save  the  reader  from  a 
possible  perplexity  as  to  why  immortality  got  no  mention  in 
the  body  of  this  book. 

The  ideal  power  with  which  we  feel  ourselves  in  connec- 
tion, the  "God"  of  ordinary  men,  is,  both  by  ordinary  men 
and  by  philosophers,  endowed  with  certain  of  those  meta- 
physical attributes  which  in  the  lecture  on  philosophy  I 
treated  with  such  disrespect.  He  is  assumed  as  a  matter  of 
course  to  be  "one  and  only"  and  to  be  "infinite";  and  the 
notion  of  many  finite  gods  is  one  Vv'hich  hardly  any  one 
thinks  it  worth  while  to  consider,  and  still  less  to  uphold. 
Nevertheless,  in  the  interests  of  intellectual  clearness,  I  feel 
bound  to  say  that  religious  experience,  as  we  have  studied 
it,  cannot  be  cited  as  unequivocally  supporting  the  infinitist 


POSTSCRIPT  515 

belief.  The  only  thing  that  it  unequivocally  testifies  to  is 
that  we  can  experience  union  with  something  larger  than 
ourselves  and  in  that  union  find  our  greatest  peace.  Philos- 
ophy, with  its  passion  for  unity,  and  mysticism  with  its 
monoideistic  bent,  both  "pass  to  the  limit"  and  identify  the 
something  with  a  unique  God  who  is  the  all-inclusive  soul 
of  the  world.  Popular  opinion,  respectful  to  their  authority, 
follows  the  example  which  they  set. 

Meanwhile  the  practical  needs  and  experiences  of  religion 
seem  to  me  sufficiently  met  by  the  belief  that  beyond  each 
man  and  in  a  fashion  continuous  with  him  there  exists  a 
larger  power  which  is  friendly  to  him  and  to  his  ideals.  All 
that  the  facts  require  is  that  the  power  should  be  both  other 
and  larger  than  our  conscious  selves.  Anything  larger  will 
do,  if  only  it  be  large  enough  to  trust  for  the  next  step.  It 
need  not  be  infinite,  it  need  not  be  solitary.  It  might  con- 
ceivably even  be  only  a  larger  and  more  godlike  self,  of 
which  the  present  self  would  then  be  but  the  mutilated  ex- 
pression, and  the  universe  might  conceivably  be  a  collection 
of  such  selves,  of  diflferent  degrees  of  inclusiveness,  with  no 
absolute  unity  realized  in  it  at  all.^  Thus  would  a  sort  of 
polytheism  return  upon  us — a  polytheism  which  I  do  not  on 
this  occasion  defend,  for  my  only  aim  at  present  is  to  keep 
the  testimony  of  religious  experience  clearly  within  its 
proper  bounds.  [Compare  p.  130  above.] 

Upholders  of  the  monistic  view  will  say  to  such  a  poly* 
theism  (which,  by  the  way,  has  always  been  the  real  reli- 
gion of  common  people,  and  is  so  still  to-day)  that  unless 
there  be  one  all-inclusive  God,  our  guarantee  of  security  is 
left  imperfect.  In  the  Absolute,  and  in  the  Absolute  only, 
all  is  saved.  If  there  be  diflferent  gods,  each  caring  for  his 
part,  some  portion  of  some  of  us  might  not  be  covered  with 
divine  protection,  and  our  religious  consolation  would  thus 

^  Such  a  notion  is  suggested  in  my  Ingersoll  Lecture  On  Human 
Immortality,  Boston  and  London,  1899. 


5l6       THE   VARIETIES   OF   RELIGIOUS    EXPERIENCE 

fail  to  be  complete.  It  goes  back  to  what  was  said  on  pages 
129-131,  about  the  possibility  of  there  being  portions  of  the 
universe  that  may  irretrievably  be  lost.  Common  sense  is 
less  sweeping  in  its  demands  than  philosophy  or  mysticism 
have  been  wont  to  be,  and  can  suffer  the  notion  of  this 
world  being  partly  saved  and  partly  lost.  The  ordinary 
moralistic  state  of  mind  makes  the  salvation  of  the  world 
conditional  upon  the  success  with  which  each  unit  does  its 
part.  Partial  and  conditional  salvation  is  in  fact  a  most 
familiar  notion  when  taken  in  the  abstract,  the  only  diffi- 
culty being  to  determine  the  details.  Some  men  are  even 
disinterested  enough  to  be  willing  to  be  in  the  unsaved  rem- 
nant as  far  as  their  persons  go,  if  only  they  can  be  per- 
suaded that  their  cause  will  prevail — all  of  us  are  willing, 
whenever  our  activity-excitement  rises  sufficiently  high.  I 
think,  in  fact,  that  a  final  philosophy  of  religion  will  have 
10  consider  the  pluralistic  hypothesis  more  seriously  than  it 
has  hitherto  been  willing  to  consider  it.  For  practical  life 
at  any  rate,  the  chance  of  salvation  is  enough.  No  fact  in 
human  nature  is  more  characteristic  than  its  willingness  to 
■live  on  a  chance.  The  existence  of  the  chance  makes  the 
difference,  as  Edmund  Gurney  says,  between  a  life  of  which 
the  keynote  is  resignation  and  a  life  of  which  the  keynote 
is  hope.^  But  all  these  statements  are  unsatisfactory  from 
their  brevity,  and  I  can  only  say  that  I  hope  to  return  to  the 
same  questions  in  another  book. 

1  Tcrtium  Quid,  1887,  p.  99.  See  also  pp.  148,  149. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Absolute,  oneness  with  the,  410 
Abstractness  of  religious  objects,  53 
Achilles,  85 

ACKERMANN,     MaDAME,     63 

Adaptation  to  environment,  of 
things,  428;  of  saints,  365-368 

•'Esthetic  elements  in  religions,  450 

Alacoque,  304,  337,  404 

Alcohol,  377 

Al-Ghazzali,   393 

Ali,  334 

Alleine,   224 

Alline,    156,   213 

Alternations  of  personality,  190-1 

Alvarez  de  Paz,  114 

Amiel,    386 

Anaesthesia,  283 

Anaesthetic  revelation,  377-383 

Angelus    Silesius,    408 

Anger,  178,  259 

"Anhedonia,"    143 

Aristocratic  type,  363 

Aristotle,  486 

Ars,  le  Cure  d',  296 

Asceticism,   268,   291-304,   352-357 

Aseity,  God's,  430,  436 

Atman,  392 

Attributes  *  of  God,  431;  their  es- 
thetic  use,   448 

Augustine,   Saint,   168,  353,   486 

AuRELius,  sec  Marcus 

Automatic   writing,   62,   468 

Automatisms,  229,  245,  467-473 


Baldwin,   339,   493 
Bashkirtseff,    82 


Beecher,  251 
Behmen,    see    Boehme 
Belief,   due  to  non-rationalistic  im- 
pulses,  72 
Besant,  Mrs.,  24,   165 
Bhagavad-Gita,   353 
Blavatsky,  Madam,  412 
Blood,    380 

BlUMHARDT,    III 

Boehme,  401,  408 
Booth,  200 
Bougaud,    336 
Bourget,  258 
Bourignon,  315 
BowNE,  492 
Brainerd,  209,  248 
Bray,  244,  251,  285 
Brownell,  505 
BucKE,  389 

Buddhism,  32,  34,  512 
Buddhist    mysticism,    392 
BuLLEN,  282 
Bunyan,    154,   157 
Butterworth,  402 

Caird,  Edward,  104 

Caird,  J.,  on  feeling  in  religion, 
424;  on  absolute  self,  440;  he 
does  not  prove,  but  reaffirms,  re- 
ligion's dicta,  443. 

Call,  284 

Carlyle,  41,  294 

Carpenter,   313 

Catharine,   Saint,   of  Genoa,   284 

Catholicism  and  Protestantism  con» 
pared,   112,  329,  451 


519 


520 


INDEX 


Causality  of  God,  507,  512 

Cause,  492 

Cennick,  296 

Centres  of  personal  energy,  193, 
261,  513 

Cerebration,  unconscious,  203 

Chance,  516 

Channing,  295,  478 

Chapman,  318 

Character,  cause  of  its  alterations, 
190;  scheme  of  its  differences  of 
type,  194,  211;  causes  of  its  di- 
versity,  256;   balance  of,   333 

Charity,  269,  273,  347 

Chastity,  304 

Chiefs  of  tribes,  363 

Christian  Science,   105 

Christ's   atonement,    126,   240 

Churches,   328,   450 

Clark,  380 

Clissold,  471 

COE,    235 

Conduct,   perfect,   347 

Confession,  451 

Consciousness,  fields  of,  226;  sub- 
liminal, 228 

Consistency,   290 

Conversion,  to  avarice,  175 

Conversion,  Fletcher's,  178;  Tol- 
stoy's, 180;  Bunyan's,  183;  in 
general.  Lectures  IX  and  X, 
passim;  Bradley's,  186;  com- 
pared with  natural  moral  growth, 
196;  Hadley's,  198;  two  types  of, 
202  a.;  Brainerd's,  209;  Alline's, 
213;  Oxford  graduate's,  216; 
Ratisbonne's,  219;  instantaneous, 
222;  is  it  a  natural  phenomenon? 
225;  subliminal  action  involved, 
in  sudden  cases,  231,  235;  fruits 
of,  232;  its  momentousness,  234; 
may  be  supernatural,  237;  its 
concomitants:     sense     of     higher 


control,  239,  happiness,  243, 
automatisms,  245,  luminous  phe- 
nomena, 246;  its  degree  of  per- 
manence, 251. 

Cosmic  consciousness,  389 

Counter-conversion,    173 

Courage,  260,  282 

Crankiness,  see  Psychopathy 

Crichton-Browne,  375,  377 

Criminal  character,  258 

Criteria  of  value  of  spiritual  affec- 
tions,  19 

Crump,  234 

Cure  of  bad  habits,  264 

Daudet,   164 

Death,  137,  356 

Derham,   483 

Design,  argument  from,  428,  482  flf. 

Dcvoutness,   333 

DioNYSius  Areopagiticus,  407 

Disease,  97,  iii 

Disorder  in  contents  of  world,  428 

Divided  Self,  Lecture  VIII,  passim: 

Cases   of:    Saint   Augustine,    168, 

H.  Alline,  170 
Divine,  the,  32 
Dog,  276 

Dogmatism,  320,  326 
dowie,   iii 

Dresser,  H.  W.,  94,  97,  284 
Drink,  262 
Drummond,  257 
Drunkenness,  377,  394,  478 
"Dryness,"  201 
Dumas,  274 
Dyes,  on  clothing,  289 

Earnestness,   258 

Ecclesiastical  spirit,  the,  328,  331 
Eckhart,  408 
Eddy,  105 

Edwards,  Jonathan,  21,  112,  196 
224,  233,  234,  243,  323 


INDEX 


521 


Edwards,  Mrs.  J.,  271,  275 
Effects  of  religious  states,  22 
Effeminacy,  357 
Ego  of  Apperception,  439 
Ellis,  Havelock,  48-49 
Elwood,  287 

Emerson,  32,  164,  202,  234,  324 
Emotion,   as   alterer  of  life's  value, 
147;  of  the  character,  192,  256  fl., 

274 
Empirical  method,  19,  320  fl.,  434 
Enemies,  love  your,  273,  278 
Energy,     personal,      193;     mystical 

states  increase  it,  405 
Environment,  348,  362 
Epictetus,  464 
Epicureans,   140 
Equanimity,  279 
Ether,  mystical  effects  of,  382 
Evil,    ignored    by    healthy-minded- 

ness,  87,  104,  128;  due  to  things 

or  to  the  Self,  131;  its  reality,  160 
Evolutionist  optimism,  90 
Excesses  of  piety,  333 
Excitement,    its    effects,    192,    261, 

273.  319 
Experience,  religious,  the  essence  of, 

498 
Extravagances  of  piety,  332,  476 
Extreme  cases,  why  we  take  them, 

476 

Failure,    135 
Faith,  240,  496 
Faith-state,  495 
Fanaticism,  331 
Fear,  96,  156,  158,  257,  270 
Feeling  deeper  than  intellect  in  re- 
ligion, 422 
Fielding,  427 
Finney,  203,  211 
Fletcher,  96,  178 
Flournoy,  67,  505 


Flower,  466 
Foster,    175,  373 
Fox,  George,  8,  286,  328,    \02 
Francis,  Saint,  d' Assist,  313 
Francis,  Saint,  de  Sales,  12 
Fraser,  444 

Fruits,    of   conversion,    232;    of    re- 
ligion, 321;  of  Saintliness,  349 
Fuller,   41 

Gamond,  283 

Gardiner,  263 
Genius  and  insanity,  18 
Geniuses,  see  Religious  leaders. 
Gentleman,    character   of   the,    311- 

363 

Gertrude,  Saint,  338 

"Gifts,"  148 

Glory  of  God,  335 

God,  32;  sense  of  his  presence,  65- 
71,  266,  270  ff.;  historic  changes 
in  idea  of  him,  73,  322  ff.,  482; 
mind-curer's  idea  of  him,  looj 
his  honor,  335;  described  by 
negatives,  408;  his  attributes, 
scholastic  proof  of,  430;  the  meta- 
physical ones  are  for  us  mean- 
ingless, 435;  the  moral  ones  are 
ill-deduced,  437;  he  is  not  a  mere 
inference,  492;  is  used,  not 
known,  497;  his  existence  must 
make  a  difference  among  phe- 
nomena, 507,  512;  his  relation  to 
the  subconscious  region,  237,  505; 
his  tasks,  509;  may  be  finite  and 
plural,  515 

Goddard,  95 

Goethe,  134 

GouGH,  200 

Gourdon,  168 

"Grace,"  the  operation  of,  222;  the 
state  of,  255 

Gratry,  143,  466,  495 


522 


INDEX 


Greeks,  their  pessimism,  85,  139 
Guidance,  461 
GuRNEY,  516 
GuYON,  272,  281 

Hadley,  198,  262 

Hale,  81 

Hamon,  358 

Happiness,   47-49.  78,  243,  274    ., 

Harnack,  98 

Hcalthy-mindedness,     Lectures     IV 

and  V,  passim;  its  philosophy  of 

evil,  129;  compared  with  morbid- 

mindedness,    159,   477 
Heart,  softening  of,  262 
Hegel,  379,  439,  444 
Helmont,  Van,  487 
Heroism,  356,  478,  note 
Heterogeneous  personality,  166,  190 
Higher  criticism,  6 
HiLTY,  78,  270,  462 
Hodgson,  R.,  514 
Homer,  85 
Hugo,  168 
Hypocrisy,   331 
Hypothesis,    what    makes    a    useful 

one,  508 
Hyslop,  514 

Ignatius  Loyola,   307,   397,  401 

Illness,  III 

"Imitation  of  Christ,"  the,  44 

Immortality,  514 

Impulses,  256 

Individuality,  492 

Inhibitions,  256  R 

Insane  melancholy  and  religion,  142 

Insanity  and  genius  18;  and  hap- 
piness, 274 

Institutional  religion,  328 

Intellect  a  secondary  force  in  re- 
ligion, 422,  504 

Intellectual  weakness  of  some 
saints,  362 


Intolerance,  335 
Irascibility,  258 

Jesus,  Harnack  on,  98 

Job,  75,  438 

John,  Saint,  of  the  Cross,  299, 
398,  404 

Johnston,  252 

Jonquil,  466 

Jordan,  339 

jouffroy,  173,  194 

Judgments,  existential  and  spirit- 
ual, 6 

Kant,  54,  438 
Karma,  512 
Kellner,  392 
Kindliness,  see  Charity 
Kingsley,  375 

Lagneau,  280 

Leaders,  see  Religious  leaders 

Leaders,  of  tribes,  363 

Lejeune,   III,  306 

Lessing,  312 

Leuba,  197,  200,  216,  241,  496,  506 

Life,  its  significance,   148 

Life,  the  subconscious,  203,  206 

Locker-Lampson,  39 

Logic,  Hegelian,  439 

Louis,   Saint,  of  Gonzaga,  343 

Love,  see  Charity 

Love,  cases  of  falling  out  of,  176 

Love  of  God,  271 

Love  your  enemies,  273,  278 

Lowell,  65 

Loyalty,  to  God,  335 

Lutfullah,   161 

Luther,    126,    135,   239,   324,  340, 

373 
Lutheran  self -despair,    106,  207 
Luxury,  357 


i 


INDEX 


523 


Lycaon,  85 
Lyre,  261 

Mahomet,   168.    See  Mohammed 

Marcus  Aurelius,  42,  44,  464 

Margaret  Mary,  see  Alacoque 

Margin  of  consciousness,  227 

Marshall,  493 

Martineau,  464  ^ 

Mather,  297 

Maudsley,  20 

Meaning  of  life,  148 

Medical  criticism  of  religion,  404 

Medical   materialism,    1 1  ff . 

Melancholy,  142,  274;  Lectures  V 
and  VI,  passim;  cases  of,  145, 
146,  154,   156,  194 

Melting  moods,  262 

Method  of  judging  value  of  re- 
ligion,  19,  221 

Methodism,  222,  232 

Meysenbug,  386 

Militarism,  357-359 

Military  type  of  character,  363 

Mill,    200 

Mind-cure,  its  sources  and  history, 
92-95;  its  opinion  of  fear,  96; 
cases  of,  100-103,  i^^,  121;  its 
message,  106;  its  methods,  110- 
121;  it  uses  verification,  11 8-122; 
its  philosophy  of  evil,  129 

Miraculous  character  of  conversion, 
222 

Mohammed,  334,  471 

MOLINOS,    128 

Moltke,  Von,  259,  358 

Monasteries,  291 

Monism,  407 

Morbidness  compared  with  healthy- 
mindedness,  477.  See,  also,  Mel- 
ancholy 

Mormon  revelations,  472 

Mortification,  see  Asceticism 


MuiR,  471 

MULFORD,   488 

MiJLLER,  457 

murisier,  341 

Myers,  228,  229,  456,  501,  514 

Mystic  states,  their  effects,  22,  403 

Mystical  experiences,  66 

Mysticism,  Lectures  XVI  and  XVII, 
passim;  its  marks,  371;  its  theo- 
retic results,  407,  413,  419;  it 
cannot  warrant  truth,  414;  it! 
results,  416;  its  relation  to  the 
sense  of  union,  499 

Mystical  region  of  experience,  505 

Natural   theology,  482 

Naturalism,  139,  164 

Nature,  scientific  view  of,  481 

Negative  accounts  of  deity,  408 

Nelson,  205,  414 

Nettleton,  211 

Newman,  F.  W.,  79 

Newman,  J.  H.,  on  dogmatic  the- 
ology, 425,  433;  his  type  of 
imagination,  448 

Nietzsche,  362,  364 

Nitrous  oxide,  its  mystical  effects, 
378 

No-function,  256-257,  293,  378, 
407 

Non-resistance,  276,  350,  367 

Obedience,  304 

Obermann,  466 

Omit,  290 

"Once-born"  type,  79,  163,  355,  477 

Oneness  with  God,  see  Union. 

Optimism,  systematic,  86;  and  evo- 
lutionism, 90;  it  may  be  shallow, 
356 

Orderliness  of  world,  428 

Organism  determines  all  menta' 
states  whatsoever,  15 


524 


INDEX 


Origin  of  mental  states  no  criterion 

of  their  value,  i6  ff. 
Orison,  397 

Over-beliefs,  503;  the  author's,  505 
Over-soul,   506 
Oxford,  graduate  of,  216,  263 

Pagan  feeling,  85 

Pantheism,  129,  407 

Pascal,  281 

Paton,  351 

Paul,  Saint,  168,  349 

Peek,   248 

Peirce,  435 

Penny,  317 

Perreyve,  495 

Persecutions,  331,  335 

Personality,  explained  away  by  sci- 
ence, 117,  481;  heterogeneous, 
166;  alterations  of,  190,  206  if.; 
is  reality,  489.    See  Character 

Philo,  470 

Philosophy,  Lecture  XVIII,  passim; 
must  coerce  assent,  424;  scholas- 
tic, 430;  idealistic,  438;  unable 
to  give  a  theoretic  warrant  to 
faith,  445;  its  true  office  in  re- 
ligion, 445 

Photisms,  246 

Piety,  352  ff. 

Pluralism,  129 

Polytheism,   129,  515 

Poverty,  309,  359 

"Pragmatism,"    435,    509,    512-514 

Prayer,  451;  its  definition,  454;  its 
essence,  454;  petitional,  456;  its 
effects,   464-467,   513 

"Presence,"  sense  of,  58-63 

Presence  of  God,  65-71,  267,  270  ff., 
387,  409 

Presence  of  God,  the  practice  of,  114 

•Primitive  human  thought,  485 

Pringle-Pattison,  444 


Prophets,  the  Hebrew,  469 
Protestant  theology,   239 
Protestantism  and  Catholicism,  112, 

223,  323,  450 
Providential  leading,  461 
Psychopathy  and  religion,  23  ff. 
Puffer,  385 
Purity,  268,  285,  341 

Quakers,  8,  286 

Ramakrishna,  353,  357 

Rationalism,  72,  73;  its  authoriri' 
overthrown  by  mysticism,  419 

Ratisboxne,  219,  252 

Reality  of  unseen  objects,  Lecture 
III,  passim 

Recejac,  398,  499 

"Recollection,"  114,  284 

Redemption,   154 

Reformation  of  character,  314 

Regeneration,  see  Conversion;  by 
relaxation,    109 

Reid,  436 

Relaxation,  salvation  by,  108.  See 
Surrender 

Religion,  to  be  tested  by  fruits,  not 
by  origin,  11  ff.,  324;  its  defini- 
tion, 27,  31;  is  solemn,  38;  com- 
pared with  Stoicism,  42;  its  un- 
ique function,  51;  abstractness  of 
its  objects,  54;  differs  according 
to  temperament,  74,  132,  326, 
and  ought  to  differ,  477;  consid- 
ered to  be  a  "survival,"  116,  480, 
488;  its  relations  to  melancholy, 
142;  worldly  passions  may  com- 
bine with  it,  330;  its  essential 
characters,  361,  ^75;  its  relation 
to  prayer,  453-455;  asserts  a  fact, 
not  a  theory,  479;  its  truth,  369; 
more  than  science,  it  holds  by 
concrete  reality,  490;  attempts  to 


evaporate  it  into  philosophy,  492; 
it  is  concerned  with  personal  des- 
tinies, 480,  493;  with  feeling  and 
conduct,  494;  is  a  sthenic  affec- 
tion, 495;  is  for  life,  not  for 
knowledge,  496;  its  essential  con- 
tents, 498;  it  postulates  issues  of 
fact,  508 

Religious  emotion,    274 

Religious  leaders,  often  nervously 
unstable,  8  ff.,  31;  their  loneli- 
ness, 328 

"Religious  sentiment,"  28 

Renan,  37 

Renunciations,  342 

Repentance,  125 

Resignation,  281 

Revelation,  the  anaesthetic,  377-384 

Revelations,  see  Automatisms. 

Revelations,  in  Mormon  Church, 
472 

Revivalism,  223 

RiBET,  397 

RiBOT,   143,  493 

Rodriguez,  307,  308,  311 

RoYCE,  444 

Rutherford,  Mark,  75 

Sabatier,   a.,   454 

Sacrifice,  297,  451 

Saint-Pierre,   82 

Sainte-Beuve,   255,  309 

Saintliness,  Sainte-Beuve  on,  255; 
its  characteristics,  266,  361;  criti- 
cism of,  320  ff. 

Saindy  conduct,  348-368 

Saints,  dislike  of  natural  man  for, 
363 

Salvation,  515 

Sanday,  470 

Satan,  in  picture,  50 

Scholastic  arguments  for  God,  428 

Science,     ignores     personality     and 


INDEX  525 

teleology,   481;   her   "facts,"   490, 

491 
"Science    of    Religions,"    424,    445, 

446,  478-481 
Scientific     conceptions,     their     late 

adoption,  486 
Second-birth,  154,  162,  163 
Seeley,  76 
Self  of  the  world,  439 
Self-despair,   108,   127,  205 
Self-surrender,  108,  205 
Senancour,  466 
Seth,  444 

Sexual   temptation,   263 
Sexuality  as  cause  of  religion,  12 
"Shrew,"  339 
Sickness,  iii 
Sick    souls.    Lectures    V    and    VL 

passim 
SiGHELE,  258 
Sin,  205 

Sinners,  Christ  died  for,  127 
Skepticism,  325  ff. 
Skobeleff,  260 
Smith,  Joseph,  471 
Softening  of  the  heart,  262 
Solemnity,  38,  48 
Soul,  191 

Soul,  strength  of,  268 
Spencer,  348,  366 
Spinoza,  10,  125 
Spiritism,  504 
Spirit-return,  314 
Spiritual  judgments,  6 
Spiritual  states,  tests  of  their  value, 

19 
Starbuck,   195,  200,  202,  205-206, 

244,  247,  253,  263,  316,  345,  385 
Stevenson,  135,  290 
Stoicism,  42-45,   140 
Strange  appearance  of  world,  148 
Strength  of  soul,  268 


526  INDEX 

Subconscious   action   in   conversion, 

232,  237 
Subconscious    life,    113,    203,    206, 

228,  231,  265,  473 
Subconscious    Self,    as    intermediary 

between  the  Self  and  God,  501 
Subliminal,   see   Subconscious 
Sufis,  394,  411 
Suggestion,   no,   229 
Suicide,   144 
Supernaturalism  its  two  kinds,  510; 

criticism   of  universalistic,   511 
Supernatural  world,  508 
Surrender,   salvation   by,    108,    205, 

208 
Survival-theory     of     religion,     480, 

488,   490 
Suso,  301,  342 
Swinburne,  413 
Symonds,  376,  381 
Sympathetic   magic,    486 
Sympathy,  see  Charity 
Systems,  philosophic,  424 


Taine,  11 

Taylor,  241 

Tenderness,  see  Charity 

Tennyson,  374 

Teresa,  Saint,  22,  339,  352,  400, 

402,  403,  405 
Theologia  Germanica,  43 
Theologians,  systematic,  437 
"Theopathy,"  336 
TuoREAU,  269 
Threshold,   132 
Tiger,  161,  257 
Tobacco,  264,  285 
Tolstoy,  146,   174,  180 

TOWIANSKI,   'v/' 

Tragedy  of    '^e,  355 
Tranquillity,  279 
Transcendentalism  cr'^'ciscd,  511 
Tranr.cendentalists,  506 


Trevor,  387 

Trine,  100,  385 

Truth  of  religion,  how  to  be  tested, 
368;  what  it  is,  500;  mystical 
perception  of,  371,  401 

"Twice-born,"   type,   163,  355,   477 

Tyndall,  294 

"Unconscious   cerebration,"    204 

Unification  of  Self,  180,  341 

"Union  morale,"  267 

Union  with  God,  400,  409,  416, 
441,  499  fl.  See  lectures  on  Con- 
version, passim 

Unity  of  universe,   129 

Unreality,  sense  of,  62 

Unseen  realities.  Lecture  III,  passim 

Upanishads,  410 

Upham,   284 

Utopias,  352 

Vacherot,  492 

Value    of    spiritual    affections,    how 

tested,   19 
Vambery,  334 
Vedantism,   392,   410,   503,   512 
Veracity,  8,  286  ff. 
Vivekananda,  504 
Voltaire,  36 
VoYSEY,  270 

War,  357-359 

Wealth-worship,  357 

Weaver,  276 

Wesley,  223 

Wcsleyan  self -despair,  106,  207 

Whitefield,  312 

Whitman,  83,  387,  496 

Wolff,  482 

Wood,  Henry,  94,  98,  116 

World,  soul  of  the,  439 

Worry,  96,   178 

Yes-function,   256-258,   293,   378 

Yoga,  391 

Young,  251 


DATE  DUE 

F^^ 

if    ■: 

«^^^ 

„,,,^,„r 

m^^m^i 

^7 

GAYLORD 

PRINTED  IN  U.SA 

